The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean
Published by Tor Publishing Group
Age Group: Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: Alternative Universe, Asian Authors, Books about Books, Fairytales, Gothic Fantasy, Gothic Horror, Lesbian Characters, Mental Health Representation, Magic Users, Mental Health, Physical Disabilities, Trauma, Various Magic
My Rating:
Published on: 2nd August 2022
Pages: 416
Disability Representation: Leg Injury, Mental Health, PTSD, Trauma
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Forbidden Planet / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / Waterstones / BookBeat Audio
Add to Goodreads

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.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

Please note
As an Amazon Associate and member of other affiliate programmes I earn a small commission from items purchased using links featured in this post at no extra cost to you. Click here to learn more. Every purchase you make through Just Geeking By helps keep this blog running.

In The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, a race of creatures called the book eaters exists, feeding on the stories of humans. They live hidden away from humans, dependent on their creativity to survive because book eaters, eaters for short, can’t create, they can’t even write. In eater societies, there is a large disparity between the number of men versus women, making it a patriarchal society where women are treated like princesses as children until they become old enough to be married off to breed. Eater women can only have two children in their lifetime, and raised on a diet of fairytales, they live in an extremely sheltered world until they go to their first marriage bed.

We see all this from the perspective of Devon, the protagonist of The Book Eaters, as she hides from her family with her second child. Through flashbacks, we learn of the dreadful trauma that she went through in her first and second marriages.  When Devon’s second son is born, a mind eater, Devon is determined to keep him safe, especially after her first daughter was taken from her. Instead of feeding on books, mind eaters feed on the minds and souls of humans. Mind eaters do not have a place in eater society; they are used as weapons by the Knights to police the Families. A drug produced by one of the other Families allows mind eaters to eat books like a normal book eater; however, when that Family spontaneously implodes due to a civil war, the drug production vanishes.

These events unfolding elsewhere in the book eater world have terrifying consequences for Devon and her newborn child, and she ends up running to save them both. As the book goes on, we find out that there is much more going on, and the horrors that Devon endured have never stopped. Without the drug to help her son eat books, Devon has to make the difficult decision to feed humans to her son; otherwise, he won’t survive.

The Book Eaters is a very dark book, and I’m not going to lie, a five-year-old devouring people’s minds by eating their brains and then adopting their personalities is extremely disturbing. He has devoured over twenty people at one count, and as a result,t he acts like an adult rather than a normal five-year-old. There are other mind eaters in the book, and not to give too much away, but Dean asks some provocative questions about what about us and our minds defines us as a person.

I found it devastatingly sad and poignant that the female eaters were lured into believing that they were princesses, that they were special, and then the facade was violently ripped away by their first husband. Dean is clearly playing with fairytale tropes, subverting them and using them to comment on women’s trauma. I couldn’t help but think that while The Book Eaters is a work of fiction, some young women are sheltered just as Devon was and are taught that the bad things only happen to women from certain backgrounds and areas. That it’s their fault that things happen to them. The idea that young women live in a fairytale is actually a reality.

I enjoyed the fragments of scientific analysis and historical facts at the start of each chapter that offered information about what the eaters were, their origins and so forth. It prevented information dumping while also having the added effect of making the reader curious about the author and how a book about eaters ever got published in the first place. It was another element of mystery, a tantalising tease for the reader who would wonder whether it would link up with the main story or was just a bonus.

While The Book Eaters is a dark book that highlights women’s trauma, it is important to point out that it is also a book about taking control of life and saying no to what is expected. Due to the low amount of female book eaters and the fact that they can only have two pregnancies in a lifetime, the book eater world is extremely heteronormative. Dean’s book is about several LGBT characters, their experiences in their society and their fight for a better world. The Book Eaters is about found family, fighting for what is important, and blood definitely not being thicker than water.

About Sunyi Dean

Sunyi Dean (sun-yee deen) is a multi-award-losing author of speculative fiction. Though born in Texas and raised in Hong Kong, she now resides in Northern England. Her debut novel, THE BOOK EATERS, was an instant #2 Sunday Times Bestseller.

In her spare time, she likes buying whisky, collecting dumbbells, and dying in jiu-jitsu. She also founded the Hugo-nominated Publishing Rodeo Podcast with fellow Tor author, Scott Drakeford.

Her highly-anticipated sophmore novel, THE GIRL WITH A THOUSAND FACES, will hit stores in May 2026.

Website | Facebook | Goodreads | Instagram | Threads

Thank you for reading my book review for The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean! The Book Eaters is currently available for pre-order from any of the links in this review and will be released on 18 August 2022.

If you could eat any book, which book would you eat? Let me know in the comments!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

Support Just Geeking By

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did please consider sharing it on social media using the nifty buttons at the end of this post <3

If you enjoyed this content please consider helping to support my blog. You can do this in multiple ways (click here to find out how!) or by donating via Ko-Fi to help me reach my current goal.