The Book Eaters

by Sunyi Dean

“Everyone is a monster to somebody.” Devon didn’t have to think for this answer; she’d prepared it long ago, in readiness. “But you are not, and never will be, a monster to me.”

The diamorphine made her sick to her stomach; it also seemed to swallow the minutes, skipping erratically through the hours.

I just love this sentence structure

How did one give shape to absence? Fill a black hole with light?

The absolutely brilliance of word structure in this book sometimes left me speechless

“None of our kind imagines the future,” Jarrow said, stretching out his legs. “We make plans and we predict things, but really, it’s too difficult to think about life outside the bounds of what we’ve already experienced. Which is exactly what the future is: life beyond what we’ve already experienced.”

She had worked out at some point that this was how the Easterbrooks conducted their trafficking without breaking a sweat; how the patriarchs overlooked the suffering and servitude of the mother-brides they destroyed; how humans could continue to exist in an infrastructure of misery. Trauma became routine, and cruelty mundane. Just life, innit.

“But 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?”

Brilliant