Hi Cara,
The review on my blog today is The Binding by Bridget Collins. This book I did pick up because of the cover. This hardback book is even prettier naked.
Books are dangerous things in Collins’s alternate universe, a place vaguely reminiscent of 19th-century England.
It’s a world in which people visit book binders to rid themselves of painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told and are bound between the pages of a book, the slate is wiped clean and their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them.
After having suffered some sort of mental collapse and no longer able to keep up with his farm chores, Emmett Farmer is sent to the workshop of one such binder to live and work as her apprentice. Leaving behind home and family, Emmett slowly regains his health while learning the binding trade.
He is forbidden to enter the locked room where books are stored, so he spends many months marbling end pages, tooling leather book covers, and gilding edges. But his curiosity is piqued by the people who come and go from the inner sanctum, and the arrival of the lordly Lucian Darnay, with whom he senses a connection, changes everything.
(Synopsis from Goodreads.com)
The Binding is a magical historical story, where the lynchpin of the story is the characters.
One of my favourite element of The Binding is the ability to bind memories and place them into a book. This means that people can get rid of painful memories like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but where people can read those memories. It’s interesting in how it’s used, and the rich abuse this ability and the poor use it to pay the bills.
There are certain aspects of The Binding plot that didn’t surprise me. As when I was reading the story I wasn’t surprised when certain memories came to light. I was just waiting for it to happen.
The Binding is a slow burn, it builds and builds especially as in the last Act it swaps POV. This helps build tension as there is more action in this section.
I liked the main characters but I wasn’t a fan of any of the supporting characters. Especially the family members. They all fit into the historical mould of keeping up appearance being different in any way is bad.
If you enjoy historical fiction with a dash of fantasy than I would advise picking up The Binding.
My Rating for The Binding is 3.5 out of 5.
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Thanks for reading,
