(Review #382)
The ultimate question: how far would a mother go for her child?
I rated The Book Eaters a 4.4/5 stars. I never could watch this story as a movie, it’d be way too scary and twisted for me. Overall it was more of a dark, depressing thriller than I had expected but I was invested the whole time. I just needed to know who would survive and who wouldn’t. But yeah… I don’t think I’d be brave enough to venture into this author’s brain or be their mind eater.
“Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn, love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.
And the other thing, the real clincher of it all, was that the good, and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.
That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and heart that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.”
It started to remind me of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood in some ways. Anyway, here’s my live thoughts while reading: Book Eaters starts with a human eating creature of some kind who deceives a victim and throws him to her ravenous son, locked away in his room. She copes by drinking herself unconscious.
So I guess it’s the humans mind that is their food source, but if they take Redemption, a substance that allows their kind to receive nutrients through stories instead, then they don’t need to be murderous creatures. But Devon doesn’t have any access to the drug for her growing son.
The chapters switch back and forth in timelines between present and Devon’s past. But each of her past gets closer and closer to the current timeline. First it’s 22 years ago, then 17 years ago, then 11 years ago.
What is the little implant scare on Cai’s abdomen from?
What secrets does Devon hide?
Why did she leave the Families in the first place?
How and why did she kill her ex husband?
Will she go with Hester?
What exactly do the knights and dragons do?
I can’t tell if her brother his the villain or trying to aid her.
At the halfway point, I’m totally empathetic with her dilemma (from the past.) But the ‘midpoint’ in her current timeline isn’t as much of a drastic shift… they’re still on the run.
The dark vibes shifted to nightmares when the religious cult aspect was brought in.
“I do know we can only live by the light we’re given, and some of us are given no light at all. What else can we do except learn to see in the dark?”