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The book eaters, sunyi dean

First book of the year! Loved it.

1/3/23 addendum: Here's the official summary

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.

OKAY so I really enjoyed this book. (Also it has a gorgeous cover! Mm. And the endpapers are a lovely, deep red.) It gripped me and I almost skipped out on a family event because I didn't want to put it down.

Big content notes on this one. I'll throw more specific notes under the jump.

The tone overall was fairly grim. On the sliding scale of pessimism to optimism, I generally prefer my fiction more optimistic, but I still find (well-executed) books on the other end compelling. It wasn't as grim as, say The Echo Wife.

There were a few points when I had to break out the sticky tabs once again, just because I couldn't continue until I'd paused to mark that line or this moment.

More thoughts to come in a future post (which will also contain spoilers)

Content notes under the jump

Content notes: violence, murder, death, depression, sexual assault, sexual consent issues, rape culture, domestic abuse, harm to children, drug and alcohol use.