by Bridget Collins

This is a rather fascinating imaginary world. Emmett buys a book at a fair and his father reacts as if he has brought something evil into the house and gets rid of it. A few years later, a woman who is a binder of books asks for Emmett to be apprenticed to her and to his confusion, his parents hand him over to his fate.

The world building unfolds slowly in this, allowing the reader to gradually get used to the beliefs and attitudes of the people and learn what it means to be bound in a book. A lot of superstition and outright fear surrounds the occupation of binding, yet Emmett is told that he was born to be a binder. Exactly what that means is revealed to the reader at the same time that it is explained to Emmett.

On his first solo binding, Emmett has no idea what he is meant to do. He also has reason to object to the assignment, yet what is entailed and why he was predicted to be a binder born soon becomes clear.

One thing that was unique about this book (apart from the entire concept) was that I actually changed my opinion about a character. After not liking Lucien for a long time, a side of him came out that made me more sympathetic. The action speeds up in the second half of the book and I actually got so engrossed into what would happen next, despite present tense writing in part three throwing me out of the story every time I started a new chapter, that I stayed up late, unable to put it down.

My one complaint is that the ending was rather abrupt. I wanted to know what happened to Emmett and Lucien after the events of those last chapters. I don't know whether a second book is planned. If it is I will probably read it and hope it holds my interest as well as this one did!

After 53 pagesI´m pretty sure that this book isn´t for me. 

I couldn´t care less about the  "What is happening behind that locked door?" kind of story and because of the flowery writing style, it will probably take the author another 50-100 pages until she tells me what is behind that freaking door. In short: I´m bored. And I don´t want to spend another 380 pages with this book.

DNF on page 53. 

So, the writing in this one:

When I woke, there was sunlight dancing on the ceiling in a billowing net, water-wrinkles that overlapped the narrow rectangle of brightness that spilt between the curtains. The whitewashed walls looked faintly green, like the flesh of an apple, marred here and there with solid froth of damp. Outside a bird whistled over and over again as if it was calling a name.

 

This author really likes her similys.

And the story is told through the perspective of a teenage boy who has a whole lot of time to take in his surroundings:

But perhaps, after all, she was right. There was something in the silence of the old house, the low rooms filled with steady autumn sunlight and the still order of the workshop, that loosened the dark knots inside me. Day after day went by, until the place wasn´t new or strange to me any more; then week after week ... I learnt things by heart: the crinkling reflections on my ceiling the gappy seams in the patchwork quilt on my bed, the different creak of each tread under my foot when I came downstairs. Then there was the workshop, the gleam of the tiles around the stove, the saffron-and-earth scent of tea, the opalescent gloop of well-mixed paste in a glass jar ... The hours passed slowly, full of small, solid details; at home, in the busyness of farm life, I´d never had the time to sit and stare, or pay attention to the way a tool looked, or how well it was made, before I used it. Here the clock dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.   

Yeah, I´m not biggest fan of this purple prose writing and, the main character being somewhere in his teens, it doesn´t ring true to being the voice of a teenager.

As for the main character himself: He might be a Gary Stu, I´m not exactly sure yet. But there has been a lot of fainting so far. A LOT of fainting.

I just watched a video, in which someone compared this book to The Night Circus, The Miniaturists and The Essex Serpent ...

[Source]

Anyway, because of the Corona virus frenzy that is going on in Germany at the moment and my decision to stop eating sweets until Easter, I´m in a bit of a self-destructive mood.

Which means, I´m going in!

TITLE:  The Binding

AUTHOR:  Bridget Collins

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DESCRIPTION:

"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."

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REVIEW:

An interesting and original concept, with a decent writing style and world building.  The story did lag in the middle though.  An enjoyable afternoon's entertainment, even with all the dark and nasty parts.