The Book Eaters

 

The Book Eaters  by Sunyi Dean          Paranormal/Urban Fantasy/Romantic Fantasy

(from Amazon)  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.

(My Review)

Literally eating books!  This book was unlike any book I've read before.  Devon eats books instead of food.  The story goes back and forth from the present to her past.  In the present, she is trying to protect her son, who has not quite inherited her book-eating, but something quite worse.  As she tries to save her son, she learns more about her past, and the secrets and lies that led her to be forced to live a certain kind of existence.  

Kindred

 

Kindred  by Octavia Butler                  African-American Science Fiction

(from Amazon) “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”  Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

(My Review)  

Wow!  What a powerful, thought-provoking story!  Dana is thrust back in time, to a plantation in the 1800's, where she finds herself saving a young boy, Rufus, the slaveowner's son.  She finds herself bouncing back and forth between the present and the past, but finds her journey is tied to Rufus (as well as her the shattering truth as it pertains to her own family).  As an African-American woman, from the twentieth-century, she finds herself caught up in a cycle of trauma and abuse of slavery as she embarks on a mission to ensure the survival of her family line.