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 human minds.
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.
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 …
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 distanced from the events as Devon distances herself from what happens, as a way to survive.
I loved the way the culture of the Book Eaters was explored and revealed, with its struggle to stay unknown in a modern world that moves increasingly fast. I also appreciated the way dark subjects were dealt with, neither glorifying or shockingly, but also without shying away from them: things like emotional abuse and its effects, sexual assault, and physical abuse.
Devon was raised as a princess, punished only by being forced to eat dictionary pages instead of fairy tales, but with the full expectation that once she was grown she would fulfill her duty and give two other Families a child each, after which she could come back home and do as she pleased.
But Devon’s son is a mind eater. To the Family, mind eaters are monsters who must be shut away and quelled firmly by Knights who are trained in how to break their spirits and “train” them to obey. Devon’s not about to let that happen to her son, though.
The only way to save her son is to secure him a drug that will allow him to eat books instead of minds. A drug that has become impossible to find in recent years. Impossible, however, is merely a suggestion for Devon.
CW: physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual assault, body horror, gore, explicit violence, domestic abuse, violence against children
I was given a copy of this book, but that has not affected my review to the best of my knowledge.
