The Binding

A Novel

by Bridget Collins

No cover — Bridget Collins: The Binding (2019, William Morrow)

hardcover, 448 pages

Published April 16, 2019 by William Morrow.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-283809-4

(3 reviews)

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 …

3 editions

Justin Pickard reviewed Binding by Bridget Collins

Compelling but unpleasant

3 stars

Read this in a single sitting, staying up until 4am to complete it, and the plot and thrust of the novel have stuck to me like clay, but can't say I enjoyed it. Reads like three very different books sutchered together. The first third is genuinely great, but gives way to something altogether murkier, manipulating the reader. A lot of gratuitous unpleasantness, ostensibly intended as – what? – class commentary, but in a way that felt, to me, at least, like writerly laziness.

fluffyfied reviewed The Binding by Bridget Collins

Very Suspenseful!

4 stars

Content warning CW vague mention of NSFW, violence, abuse

I binged this book in a few days now. 👀 It's good! Very suspenseful, it kept me up too long for two nights. I like the main characters and the setting. The "binding" idea is very interesting, too, and wonderfully explored. Though I'm glad I didn't really read the summary because it includes stuff which is a mystery to the main character for quite a while and it was nice to find it out together with him. xD

It contains strong violence and quite a lot of various kinds of abuse, which is written out - or at least vaguely circumscribed. There is an intimate scene of two minor character, which the main character does hear but not see. But the intimate scenes of the main character himself are so abruptly skipped, that it took me a while to understand that they happened. 🙈 I really don't understand why! Only straight sex allowed in a novel with MLM main characters or what??

The book has three parts and I read them like this: 1, 3, 2. Works as well. 😆

I've read the German edition "Die verborgenen Stimmen der Bücher" which translates to 'the hidden voices of the books'. Imo "Die Bindung", meaning binding but also bond/tie or relationship, would have been a nice title as well, so I don't know why they changed it...

Alan

rated it

Jan. 1, 2021