Synopsis
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.
Rating
★★★★½
Thoughts
What a spellbinding story! The Binding is a slow-burn book filled with romance and witchcraft, set in a magical, yet callous society. The book’s world and its characters are so exceptionally described that I couldn’t help but feel as though I had been trapped between its pages—which is really quite fitting, given the story’s premise.
I hungrily devoured Collins’s hypnotic words right up to the last. Ah, but that abrupt ending left me wondering what had just happened and why. I still needed so many questions answered after becoming attached to our dear Emmett! Even so, I finished this book in the state of awe.
It is rare that I can appreciate an emotionally heavy book, and this one is absolutely overflowing with despair. However, Collins’s writing prompted me to focus on the story’s moral fiber, which led me down so many philosophical rabbit holes. And there is little that I love more than a good think.