The Book Eaters

Hardcover, 304 pages

English language

Published May 10, 2022 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.

ISBN:
978-1-250-81018-2
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4 stars (23 reviews)

Truth is found between the stories we're fed and the stories we hunger for.

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon―like all other book eater women―is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger―not for books, but for …

5 editions

Review of 'The Book Eaters' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I don't know how to categorize this book -- literary gothic horror? It combines disparate flavors masterfully, with just the right amount of tawdry thriller thrown into the mix to make it accessible to a mass audience. It's like a master chef making an "elevated" pineapple pizza. This is one I'll be coming back to again.

Honestly spectacular, genuine and fresh. A seven-course meal of a novel that served up everything I wanted and more. I'm sated.

A gothic family horror

3 stars

The Book Eaters is an original idea. At least, I've never come across another book in which a vampiric race sustains itself by ingesting books. It's a gothic family horror in which the main character, Dev, must save her child, a rare type of vampire who doesn't live on books but rather by feeding on human minds. The novel's plot takes many twists and turns with it's associated double and triple crosses.

I kept flipping between 3 and 4 stars on this rating, so it's a solid 3.5 stars. While the mother's plight is relatable, the book vampires are so alien a concept I had difficulty empathizing with them. She certainly commits some reprehensible acts to ensure her son's survival.

Review of 'The Book Eaters' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

How did one give shape to absence? Fill a black hole with light?

I added The Book Eaters to my reading list after seeing it was nominated in the 2022 Fantasy category. I'm no stranger to fantasy and enjoy different takes on the genre. The Book Eaters is a low fantasy story with a very unique magic system.

It's a fun concept simply told. Right off the bat I was enthralled by the idea of a book eater.

There is also Victorian era/Bourgeoisie/Vampire vibe to the story where families can be comprised of different types of eaters, they are self governed but also have to work together to keep the harmony.

It is one thing to have a repository of data, and quite another to use it.

Unfortunately the story, albeit short, wore on, felt repetitive and I didn't find myself as interested in the characters.

I could see …

First favorite book of 2023

5 stars

It's hard to find books with unique approaches to fantasy, so I'm always excited to find a story that's truly original. This is one of them. The story is about a subspecies of humans (maybe?) who eat books instead of food, and they absorb the information in books they eat. Their society reminded me of an extreme evangelical religious cult run by the men. The story is about a young woman who tries to escape the crushing patriarchal society to save her son. I found the characters well developed and the story compelling. There are elements of suspense and mystery, trying to figure out what will happen next and who the main character can really trust. I blew through the book in a couple days. Thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Review of 'The Book Eaters' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A pretty good book overall. I didn't expect it to veer so much into horror territory! The only thing that bothered me was the book kept too many secrets from the reader for too long. There were a couple points that I didn't know what was going on, only for them to be revealed completely out of the blue a couple chapters later. However, I enjoyed this, and will be wary of people saying they're hungry for a while now!

reviewed The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

The Book Eaters

3 stars

Content warning ** spoiler alert **

Review of 'The Book Eaters' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

"For Chrissakes, I'm a grown-up. Swearing is my privilege!"

I don't generally read urban fantasy (too "real" in a way I can't really describe, and it tends to bore me), and I definitely don't read vampire/gothic horror stuff (too romance-riddled). But I guess when you throw those genres in a blender with a unique magic system and some found-family LGBT elements, it made the whole thing a whole lot more interesting.

Devon is a book eater, a small, secretive clan of people who, rather than reading books and eating food, eat their books. Like, literally, page by page, cover to cover, omnomnom down the hatch, eat books for sustenance and knowledge. They're a very small clan and predisposed to giving birth to more males than females, so the rare females of the clan live a pampered life of a princess--doomed to arranged marriages and being treated more like property than …

Review of 'The Book Eaters' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This book is a darkly incredible foray into abuse that has trickled down from past generations to the future ones. I couldn’t help but identify with Devon’s struggle to break the cycle with her own son Cai, especially with her lamenting when she fails to live up to the person she wants to be—a role-model she never had, trying to create a better world for her son than the one she grew up in.

This is a contemporary fantasy that takes place in England, but it’s split storyline. While the present-day Devon’s storyline takes place in or near present-day, there’s also another storyline with her younger self in childhood, and the way the two are woven together is absolutely masterfully done. Dark, terrible things happen to Devon bringing her to her present-day quest to save her son, but they aren’t lingered on or described in detail. Instead, the reader is …

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