Sunyi Dean

Pros: brilliant world-building, interesting characters, fast paced

Cons:

Raised as a princess in one of the 6 remaining book eater houses in England, Devon Fairweather learns at her first marriage, that being pampered is not the same as being free. Now, she’s trying to escape the families along with her mind eater son.

The book alternates between scenes in the present with Devon on the run and scenes from the past that explain how she got to this point. The pacing is great and there is a mix show more of highly tense moments an downtime where you really get to know the main characters.

The world-building here is great. The book eaters are unique, and the mind eaters terrifying. The author does a great job of blending their curious and often antiquated style of living, with the modern day world. I also loved how she worked in knights and dragons.

Devon is a complicated woman. She loves her son, enough to get him humans to feed on, while also being scared of that need to feed. In some ways she’s suffered greatly, in others she’s still weirdly naive. I didn’t quite agree with some of her principles, but despite her crimes she still comes off as sympathetic and you still want to see her succeed.

It’s a strange book, telling about a strange people, and is wildly entertaining if you like darker urban fantasy. show less

Devon is a Book Eater, a separate species of human which eats books instead of food, who is on the run with her young son Cai, a rare type of Book Eater who eats human minds instead of books. She’s searching for a secretive family of Book Eaters who have invented a medication that will allow Cai to live without eating minds, while also evading her own family who want to take Cai away from her. Through their backstory we learn about the Book Eaters’ strange society, how Devon got to this show more point, and why she longs to break free.

A great read! Really interesting world-building and good characters. The Book Eaters have very cult-y vibes - they live in remote enclaves hidden around England and the rarity of their species gives the patriarchs complete control over their families (especially child-bearing women). Devon is an intriguing character - she's very pragmatic because, as she and we are told, Book Eaters are incapable of creative thinking. But is that really true if she can imagine a better life for her son? Many parts of this story are very dark - victims can't survive for long after Cai eats their minds, but Devon is not willing to let him suffer and die so she has no choice but to find victims for him. However, Devon finds kinship with others who have suffered under the strict society Book Eaters society, so not all is hopeless.
I very much enjoyed the writing style and I can't wait to read what the author writes next, whether it's in this world or another. show less

Scattered around the world are small, isolated communities of book eaters, who take nourishment from books instead of food. They also absorb the information of every book they eat, with nearly perfect recall.

In Britain, the book eaters are the Six Families, each living in a large family manor. With so small a community, marriages are carefully planned and arranged to maintain genetic diversity as much as possible; in order to keep the women docile and obedient about these arranged marriages, show more girls are raised on a limited diet of fairy tales and damsels in distress.

From childhood, Devon has been sneaking into her uncle's library and eating books she shouldn't, which has made her an unusually rebellious young woman, unwilling to follow the usual protocols and abandon her children when she is moved into a new marriage/breeding opportunity. When her son, Cai, is born with a rare mutation that makes him a potential danger to other book eaters, she is determined to rescue him from the restrictions of life among the other "dragons" and give them both an independent life away from the Families.

Very entertaining blend of fantasy (*) and thriller. The world of the book eaters has been smartly thought out, with interesting details that never feel like mere "oh, wouldn't this complicate things nicely!" contrivances. Devon and Cai are well rounded characters, and the supporting players are crisply and quickly drawn, given enough depth to feel like more than pieces to be moved around the gameboard.

(* -- One could quibble about whether the book eaters are fantasy creatures or SF creatures. The Families' own understanding of how they came to be on earth is that they were placed here by aliens, which I suppose would technically make this SF, but there's a lot of ambiguity about that explanation. It falls somewhere in the realm of myth or legend for the Families, who are for reasons that Dean explains not given to keeping accurate historical records. Whatever genre you choose to slot the book into, the story works.)

There is perhaps one "but you didn't know that I was really working for..." reversal too many in the final chapters, but aside from that, the thrills work, the villains are thoroughly hissable, and Dean does a fine job of building suspense.

I went into this book with modest expectations. I'm not a big fantasy reader, and what I knew of the premise sounded like something that could easily get too twee for my tastes. So this was a delightful surprise, and I look forward to seeing what Dean does next. show less

*Free e-book ARC received from the publisher through Edelweiss Plus - thank you!*

How far would you go for the people you love? That's what Devon has to decide when her son, Cai, is born not a book eater like she is, but a mind eater. Her people call them "dragons," and they feed leaving humans, if alive at all, a shell of themselves with no memories or real mind left at all when left to their own devices. On the run from her Family, Devon needs to get the drug Redemption for Cai, which will show more allow him to eat books like her, but the Family who makes it has disappeared and doesn't want to be found.

The narrative stays with Devon's point of view, and we go back and forth between the present, with Devon and Cai on the run over the course of just a few days, and the backstory of exactly how we got here, starting with Devon's childhood of eating fairy tales and being raised to marry and produce more book eaters. I really enjoyed immersing myself in Devon's world and wrestling with her morals and choices. It's grim and Gothic and very good. show less