This was a weird and unique read. If you like darker fantasy that plays with ideas as the basis for stories, this might be a good one for you to check out. It was relatively short, but the imagination the author showcases was really fun, and the icky elements were icky in a good way. I’m not quite sure how to talk about the book, though!
The main character here is Devon, a Book Eater, which is a human-like being who instead of eating food, eats stories and words and other communications printed on paper. The ‘You are what you eat’ mentality is literal here, because if a Book Eater snacks on a map, they now have that map inside their mind, and if all they are fed is fairy tales from a young age, as Devon is, those are the ideas that shape their being and mindset. The Book Eaters live in secret among humans, but their society is dying out.
The main conflict of the book is that Devon has a son, and some time before the narrative starts, she and her son have fled from the other Book Eaters. This is ostensibly because her son is a Mind Eater, a more rare type of Book Eater that needs human brains to sustain their lives, and in a similar way, who absorbs the information inside those brains in a truly creepy way. But there is also more going on here than would first appear.
This wasn’t a perfect book, and I don’t know if I would read it again, but I found it an interesting way to spend a couple of days, and the elements that intrigued me were so interesting that I will definitely be checking out more books from Sunyi Dean in the future.
