You’re the only princess in our little castle,” Uncle Aike would say with a wink. Tall and gray-haired, he enjoyed folding his lanky frame into comfortable chairs and drinking copious quantities of inktea. “You get to be Princess Devon. Just like in the fairy tales, eh?” He would make a little flourish with his hands, a smile crinkling up the corners of his mouth. Dean fully invests readers in Devon’s struggles, both as a girl attempting to prise tiny snatches of freedom from a patriarchal society and as an adult mother frantic to protect her son. The Book Eaters‘ depiction of the sacrifices and joys of motherhood is particularly nuanced, grounding the fantasy elements of the story in the relationship between Devon and Cai. And Dean expertly expands the scope of the story to explore even more characters’ experiences, such as the other ‘eater women’s oppression and loneliness, Devon’s friend Yarrow’s isolation as an asexual person in the procreation-obsessed ‘eater society and Cai’s pain at being viewed as a monster. The Book Eaters asks us to look at family not always as just who raised us, but who can truly see us for everything that we are and love us all the fiercer for it. I know that this book will not be for everyone, and that is completely okay! I hope your next book pleases you better <3

A minor gripe, pertaining solely to the audiobook. The narrator reads with Northern accent which makes sense because Devon is from the North of England, but she never switches it to anything else, even when reading the parts of other characters who are from different parts of the UK. This sometimes made the book really confusing as it wasn't immediately apparent who was speaking.

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This book is SEVERELY deceptive in its marketing. If I were to describe it, it would be a mix of Midsommar (a red flag right there, as far as I'm concerned) and The Handmaid's Tale with a bit of Sophie's Choice thrown in the mix. The book-eating element is completely irrelevant to the story, which is a shame because the premise itself is very interesting and, quite frankly, the main selling point (just read the summary). The overall impression I got is that Book Eaters is a very heavy-handed metaphor of literally any weird secluded oppressive cult you can find anywhere in the world, because the MO is usually the same as the one described in this story.

And under them were the seven Fairweather children, of whom all except Devon were boys. There were very few women around, for girl-children were rare among the Families. The uncles outnumbered the aunts, just as the brothers outnumbered their sister, and no brides were in residence at the time. Devon’s own mother was an unremembered face, having long since moved on to another marriage contract. This is not the first novel I've written, only the first I managed to get published, and I did not start out in short fiction — I only began writing shorts a couple of years ago. The "read" dates are roughly the amount of time it took to write, revise, and hand in my completed edits on it. I'm super slow, sorry! I wrote this book while crawling through a very difficult period of my life, and though it is far from perfect I am still really happy to have seen it across the finish line. No one here is exactly a princess or a knight or a dragon, but this is the mythos of the Families. The rare girls are prized, but kept in the dark about so many things. Their purpose is to grow up, marry twice, bearing one child in each marriage, and then become one of the aunts who lurk around the old houses. Knights help all of this along. Dragons, though, have no say in anything. I get easily frustrated by urban fantasy. I love it, but what we're doing here, in general, is exploring the modern world with an "other" that feeds into our cultural understanding of monstrosity to juxtapose against humanity. I don't think this one touched any of that.

Staff

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond." The vicar nodded, lips pursed with concern. “If you are happy for me to try, I will see if I can speak to him.” Devon Fairweather is a book eater, a human-like creature who feeds on books and knowledge to survive. Devon Fairweather is a princess, one of the very rare women among The Families, the book-eater clans. But, above all, Devon Fairweather is a mother who will do everything and anything to keep her son, Cai, safe from the Families as Cai is a mind eater, someone who feeds on brains to survive. The men in power want to chain him like a monster for their own benefit and there is no way Devon will allow that. She herself has been restrained by the doctrinaire rules of The Families her entire life—her son will be free, or she will die trying. i've thought about it a lot and, you know what, i kind of get where book eaters are coming from: if i could eat—and i mean, physically ingest—this book, i probably would. i'm not even ashamed. that's how good it is. A powerful story of overwhelming mother love, as something both powerful and potentially horrific. It’s a book that delves into the need to survive even when a system is built to break you or determined to crush you; a powerful queer story about difference that refuses to flinch away from difficult choices or the impact of trauma, both generational and inflicted. Readers will devour this compelling, rich fantasy."— Booklist, starred review