Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

This is a difficult book to describe, but it’s one of my favorites of the year. It blends fantasy and horror with great character development and creativity.  Set in England, Devon is a woman who grew up in a strange family, the child of creatures who look human but who eat books instead of food. This book was recommended by author Jenny Lawson and was part of her Fantastic Strangelings book club.

Devon grows up on classic fairy tales and is told she’s a princess. Indeed, she comes from an incredibly privileged family, but that comes with obligations – women are expected to submit to arranged marriages and then they must bear children and leave them forever. This lifestyle is meant to ensure the continuation of their species, but Devon quickly becomes disillusioned when forced to give up her first child and realizes how much her family controls every aspect of her life. Then her second child is born with a dreaded condition – he is a mind eater, not a book eater. He’ll starve unless he feeds regularly on human brains.  Devon has only very difficult options – if she stays with her family she must give up her child. If she escapes, she needs to sacrifice innocent humans, unless she can find a very rare cure. 

It’s a thrilling story from start to finish, full of twists and turns, and filled with fascinating characters. Devon can’t trust anyone, not her husband, her brother, her new friend, even her young son, whose personality alters with every mind he eats. I loved the way Dean tells the story, beginning in the present but then telling Devon’s story from her childhood. I also loved the contrast in the settings, from gothic Yorkshire mansion to inner city apartments and bars.

There’s also more to this story than brain-eating and daring escapes – Devon has to wrestle with her feelings about family obligation, personal identity, isolation, parenthood and sacrifice. Like the best horror novels, it’s also a meditation on what it means to be a monster and what it means to be innocent. And it’s about the impact of stories on our lives – the stories we ingest become a part of who we are.

For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

If there’s any weakness in this book, it’s that Dean covers so many interesting issues and characters, they can’t all be covered in as much depth as you might want. For example, even the issues of what it means for these people to read and write, and how that affects how they experience the world, could have been explored more than it was. The same with abusive marriages. But I did love the way Dean ties so much together. I might have asked for a bit more about Devon’s relationships with Hester and Jarrett, but that’s only because I enjoyed the book so much, I wanted more. 

I highly recommend this for anyone who likes books that combine realism and fantasy (and don’t mind a little gore).