Book Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

Book title: The Book Eaters
Author: Sunyi Dean
Genre: Modern fantasy
Published: August 18, 2022 by HarperVoyager
298 pages
My rating: 3.5/5

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

Hidden across England and Scotland live six families of book eaters. Devon Fairweather grows up thinking that she’s a princess like the princesses in the fairytales she eats. But life doesn’t always have a happy ending and love can be destructive, as Devon learns when her son is born with a darker kind of hunger – he doesn’t eat books, but minds.

The Book Eaters is a gritty modern fantasy with strong feminist themes of motherhood and misogyny. The book eater world is male-dominated, and the scarcity of women have made them commodities to be sold from one family to another. Devon is a devoted mother who is forced leave behind the daughter she loves and is determined not to let the same happen with her son, no matter what it takes, even letting her son eat the minds of innocent people. The writing is dark and evocative, setting up the gothic tones of this novel fantastically.

However, despite the original and intriguing premise, the story didn’t live up to it. I failed to connect to any of the characters, possibly because I have a hard time liking morally gray characters. The LGBT+ representation in this book was nice, but it could have been developed more. Devon’s self-discovery of her lesbianism (or bisexuality? It’s not entirely clear from the book) could have formed a bigger part of her character development. Now her and Hester’s relationship felt rushed.

This book had an irritating way of teasing the reader by hinting at information the reader was missing. I don’t usually mind if relevant information is revealed piecemeal but with this book I for some reason found it annoying. For example, early on Devon mentions that there are dragons – exciting, right? Except later it’s revealed that they’re not real dragons, it’s just a nickname for mind eaters.

My biggest problem with the book is that there was no real need for the characters to be book eaters. Book eating and the feminist themes of the story are not inherently connected. You could have had the exact same story with the characters being vampires. I would have liked to see more connection between the practice of book eating and the culture of the book eaters – if the book eaters’ minds are shaped by what they read, why isn’t their culture more modern? It’s not like they only ate classics.

Related to that, I found the feminist themes strangely outdated and not relevant to a modern day woman. Devon and the rest of the book eaters live in a modern world, but they might as well have been stuck in the Victorian era with the way the women are treated. If this had been a historical fantasy set in the 19th century that wouldn’t have bothered me at all, but the mentions of video games and cellphones only dragged me out of the story.

Although this book works as a standalone, the ending opens up a possibility for a sequel. Some other hints also give this book a bit too obvious “series potential,” which in and of itself is fine but it felt like things were deliberately left unexplained so that there is room for a sequel. As I’m not sure if I’d care to continue with the series, I would have wanted a bit more closure.

In conclusion, if you like dark and gritty modern fantasy with morally gray characters, you’ll probably enjoy this book more than I did. The worldbuilding and writing are good, but for me this book left a lot to be desired. I’m giving it three and a half stars, because despite its flaws I enjoyed the originality of the worldbuilding.