the Binding by Bridget Collins

 

​Spoiler alert. This will break your heart, in the best way possible.

There are those kind of books where their cover just speaks to you, yes I am a victim of consumerism, you barely know what they’re about but you fall in love and you buy them. And then they sit on your bookshelf, unread, for years. Yup, this is what this book was for me. I bought in in January 2020 during my weekend-trip to London. I remember searching for an edition with purple sprayed edges as that wa the one I had seen in the shop window and obviously Id want one of those. In the end I asked one of the booksellers and he actually ended up climbing into the window display for me to get one. It ended up in my TBR bookshelf and I didnt touch it again up until now.

Imagine this. Stories in books aren’t just made up, they are memories, bound from a persons mind who can’t bare to remember them any longer. Once the memory is bound onto pages, it’s erased from ones mind. Books are a dangerous, threatening, thing, feared by most. Then there’s Emmett. A farmers boy who is suffering from some kind of mental illness and gets called in to become the apprentice of one feared bookbinder. Slowly regenerating, he learns the art of bookbinding for months on end. But Emmett is just a bit too curious when it comes to books and there is this one boy with whom he feels just a bit too connected.

I am IN LOVE! As I told you earlier, I went into this expecting a high fantasy, which I mean I kinda got, but it’s so different and so much more than that! Firstly, it’s told in three parts. One in the present, the second one in the past, and the third one back in the present buuut from another perspective. Normally I’d find something like that really confusing and unnecessarily complicated but it just worked. Emmett is a great character, not perfect in any means but I love that he’s stubborn, curious, he likes to do things his own way like when he gets a new idea of hpw to do a certain thing another way he’ll try. And he’s dedicated. To his family first and then, to himself.To what really matters to him. I also ADORE the love story in this. Actually, if I had to I wouldn’t call this a fantasy story, I’d call it a love story with fantasy aspects. You really start rooting for them. I got angry, like shout at my book angry, upset (yes there are tearstains in it now) but also fascinated and gripped. This story tore my heart to pieces and set it, slowly but surely, all back together again. So please read it asap so I have someone to talk about it. I would love to tell you so much more, but I really want you to read it.

 

thanks so much for reading,

xx Aria