The Binding – Bridget Collins

Imagine you could erase grief.
Imagine you could remove pain.
Imagine you could hide the darkest, most horrifying secret.
Forever.

Young Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a strange letter arrives summoning him away from his family. He is to begin an apprenticeship as a Bookbinder—a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice among their small community but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.

For as long as he can recall, Emmett has been drawn to books, even though they are strictly forbidden. Bookbinding is a sacred calling, Seredith informs her new apprentice, and he is a binder born. Under the old woman’s watchful eye, Emmett learns to hand-craft the elegant leather-bound volumes. Within each one they will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, a binder can help. If there’s something you need to erase, they can assist. Within the pages of the books they create, secrets are concealed and the past is locked away. In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, rows upon rows of books are meticulously stored.

But while Seredith is an artisan, there are others of their kind, avaricious and amoral tradesman who use their talents for dark ends—and just as Emmett begins to settle into his new circumstances, he makes an astonishing discovery: one of the books has his name on it. Soon, everything he thought he understood about his life will be dramatically rewritten.

Review

The Binding is one of the most stunning books I’ve seen in a long time. The cover immediately drew me in and the hardback version of this book is incredibly beautiful. When I found out it told the story about bookbinding, I knew I had to read it. The story turned out to be very different from what I was expecting. It is a lot less magical and cosy and a lot more emotional and raw. 

The book is divided in three major parts. The first one introduces us to Emmett Farmer, a boy with a peculiar illness that seems to have come out of nowhere and has lingered on for far longer than any normal illness. As his surname suggests his family owns a farm and Emmett feels a sense of guilt for not being able to contribute as much to the workload as he used to due to his illness. His family has also been acting quite strangely around him even since he became ill. One day he is summoned to become the apprentice of a Bookbinder. Books are forbidden where Emmett lives, even though he doesn’t understand why. Bookbinders are seen as witches and wizards, people avoid them and fear them. But even so, Emmett’s family agrees to send him to the Bookbinder to Emmett’s astonishment.

The middle part of the book is an interesting flashback that throws the whole story into a different perspective and also clears up quite a few mysteries from the first part. It has a very different tone and atmosphere, with a romance aspect that I wasn’t expecting. This part of the story is admittedly a lot lighter and breezy. But as the implications of all this sink in and the connections are made with what we learned of the present time in the first part of the book, a shadow falls over it all.

I really liked the concept of Binding. Even though it is so much more than our bookbinding, it developed into a very realistic trade. There’s the rarer, traditional Binder who only wants to bind certain books and who guards the books with their lives. Then there’s the Binder who has rather loose morals and sees it as a way to climb the ranks of society and earn a lot of money. Ultimately there’s the Binders that work out of the slums. They take advantage of the weak and vulnerable to earn money, unconcerned about the way they destroy lives. 

I would maybe have preferred to read a bit more about the process of the binding and the making of the books. I was really fascinated by it and I feel like, although it was the main storyline, it could have used a bit more attention. 

There is a melancholy and sad tone throughout the novel, one that captivated me and made me want to keep reading. In the end The Binding left an impression that will linger for a long time. It wasn’t the story I was expecting or even the story I would have wanted to read when first picking up this book, but it still managed to pull me in and keep me interested in the fate of the characters and the storylines. That in itself shows how accomplished a story it is and how well crafted the characters and atmosphere of the book is. 

Release Date: January 10th, 2019
Publisher: The Borough Press
Age Group: (Young) Adult
Pages: 437
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought