As beautiful as it is clever
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The Blurb:
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.
The Review
Brace yourselves everybody, I hope you are ready. It's time for the long awaited and seldom seen, return of the FIVE STAR REVIEW!
I'm not sure I even know where to start with this one. I've fallen completely and utterly in love with everything about this book. The cover, for starters, I mean - just LOOK at it. And rest assured that this a book that is as cleverly crafted as it is beautiful.
This appears to fall under the genre of 'fantasy historical fiction', and had I known that, I dread to think...I might have avoided it. For me, that conjours up ideas of knights on horseback or tales of wizards and mythical beasts. Not so, not at all.
Books exist in this story, but not as we know it in the real world. Bookbinding is a skilled art and only a selected few have the abilities to do it, and even fewer chose to do so ethically. The art of bookbinding exists to remove painful or horrifying memories from willing customers. Imagine the worst thing that could ever happen to you in your life and how hard it would be to deal with that for the rest of your life. Then imagine you could visit someone who could remove that memory from you, so for you it is as if it never even happened. And you can never relearn your history, unless your book is destroyed. Isn't the concept itself just utterly enthralling? So often, amazing plot concepts exist and then aren't well executed and it breaks your heart for what should be an epic book, falls flat on its face. But Collins has taken this idea and woven the most beautiful story out of it.
The story unfolds in 3 parts and this is what really makes it so clever. In the first third, we meet Emmett and we realise immediately something awful has happened to him. He is suffering the lingering effects of an illness that he doesn't remember, but its clear that something horrifying has happened to him. He is taken from his home and everything he has ever known, into the care of Seredith, as her apprentice Bookbinder. He has no idea why she has chosen him or why his family allowed her to take him away from them. His loneliness and confusion in this section is palpable and painful to read.
And then... I just wasn't prepared for what happened in part 2. It's clear we've gone back in time and are about to find out what happened to Emmett, but nothing makes sense. And then you realise the twist, and I genuinely stopped and thought, 'this is really bloody clever.' The lead up to Emmett's downfall unfurls slowly and once you realise what is happening you can't believe you didn't always know it. It made me want to go back and re read the first section to relive it in context of my new-found knowledge.
I don't want to go into any more of the plot, because to do so would create spoilers, and I wouldn't want to ruin this for anyone. But rest assured, this is utterly beguiling from start to finish.
If I had one criticism, it would be that the story starts off quite slowly and to start with I found this a tiny bit frustrating. But this is the kind of story that needs time to breathe, had the author rushed in, it wouldn't have had the same effect on me, as it slowly crept inside my heart and refused to leave. So please, stick with it.
There aren't enough superlatives for me to describe how I feel about this book. I found it evocative, passionate, wondrous, magical, earthy and tantalising. I fell in love with the characters and their relationships with each other were so beautifully crafted
It's been a while since I read a book so wonderfully executed, that upon finishing it, I almost wanted to start it again. And don't just take my word for it, The Binding is already sitting at Number 1 in the Times Hardback Fiction Chart, and it wont be long before it's sitting on all kinds of 'Books of 2019' lists.
Thanks to the Publisher and Netgalley for this preview copy in return for an honest review.
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