Non-Review: The Book Eaters

The Book Eaters
By Sunyi Dean

Published By: Harper Voyager
Publication Date: August 18, 2022
Date Abandoned: February 5, 2023
Genre: Adult – Fantasy
Source: Bought
Format: Hardback
Pages: 304

From Goodreads:
Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters is a contemporary fantasy debut. It’s a story of motherhood, sacrifice, and hope; of queer identity and learning to accept who you are; of gilded lies and the danger of believing the narratives others create for you.

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 fairytales 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.

The Book Eaters is a book that has been on my radar for a while. I received it in one of my Illumicrate boxes and thought it sounded really interesting. After having it recommended to me by a friend, for part of my 12 books recommended by 12 friends challenge, I finally decided to pick this one up. I was honestly really torn by this one.

The premise of The Book Eaters is really intriguing. It follows the story of a girl who comes from a family of book eaters, people who literally eat books and absorb knowledge of the world this way. When one of her children is born a mind eater, rather than a book eater, she goes on the run with him to save his life. She is desperate to find a cure, and save her son. I really enjoyed the premise. It was really weird, but in a good way. The book follows two timelines, the main characters history from when she is a child and the present day where she is on the run with her son. At first I really enjoyed this and couldn’t wait to see what happened to cause what was happening present day. But the more I read, the more I realised that I was losing interest. I didn’t care what was going to happen, and struggled to find the motivation to pick this one up. Rather than end up in a horrid book slump, I decided to cut my losses and quit reading this one.

I got to around 54% before I decided to abandon The Book Eaters. I do still think the premise is so original and fascinating, but unfortunately I didn’t feel like it was executed as well as it could have been. I was so into it and interested at the start, but the more I read, the more bored I became. I’m sure this book will have a huge fanbase, but unfortunately this one just wasn’t for me.

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