A book club book! This is a vampire-esque story set in modern England, only instead of them surviving on human blood, they eat--you guessed it--books! The story centers on Devon who is on her own and caring for her son, a particular kind of book eater who eats people's brains if they don't have access to a medication. The narrative alternates between following them in the present day and her childhood and young adulthood showing us how they ended up there, and the specific cultural institutions she's fighting against to survive and raise her son.
There's also a whole plot about the women of each family being controlled and married off in order to strengthen family lines, and the difficulty they have with breeding because women can only have two (at most) children before they become infertile, and a whole lot of nonsense society construction around all of this. The narrator is well-aware of how nonsense it is, because it's not as if the patriarchy is a sensible system, but it's also not exactly an uplifting story. There was a lot to chew on (heh) in this book, but it never quite coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts, for me.
Grade: B
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