by Sunyi Dean
If a librarian were to write a book about vampires . . . If a librarian who was sick and tired of vampires were to write a book about vampires, this would be it.
There’s no metaphor at work here. The book eaters don’t “consume” books and knowledge through voracious reading. They simply consume them – no quotation marks. Their “book teeth” extend (which had me thinking of something like a beaver’s teeth) and they chew away. In so doing, the information or stories contained within pass into their minds and memory.
And thus do the six families live. Aloof and aristocratic, only consorting with humanity at dire need. Women of the households are pampered and protected, but also forced into marriages and pregnancies as a part of a strict “breeding program” to preserve their dwindling numbers. The men, when not made patriarch of their family, are most often handed over to the Knights. And the Dragons . . . Every once in a while a child is born without the ability to consume knowledge through the eating of books but must instead take it directly from a human mind . . . where once they were killed at birth, they are now tortured into subservience to their knight masters.
Devon has gone on the run from her family and their breeding program, and their desire to tear her son away from her and put him in a dragon’s collar . . .
