Review of ‘The Binding’ by Bridget Collins

Name of the Book : The Binding
Author : Bridget Collins
Year of Publication :
Genre : Novel, Fantasy, Fiction, Magic Realism,(LGBTQ)
Rating : 5/5🌟
Page count : 438

Goodreads blurb :
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.

My Review:

Its after a long time that i have a read a book and it has not bored me , not even at single page. And left me with an amazing feeling. Be it plot, the relationships, or the concepts; All of it makes it a page turner.

What if someone tells you that the book you are reading, is not someones imagination but an event and part of a life of a real person. In collins world, Books are divided into two categories, True bindings( People’s memories) and fakes (novels). These bindings are dangerous as they are the memories that are sucked out of peoples mind (willingly), and can be more dangerous if someone reads it or worse- burn it. And in this whirlwind of memories are stuck the lives of two young boys/men – Emmett Farmer & Lucian Gray.

This book is like our fantasy come true. Everyone in life have atleast thought it once in a lifetime that, ‘I wish I could forget this/that and start anew’ Haven’t we? Binding is basically a process where if you want certain memories to wipe away from your mind, you go to a binder and binder helps you erase them and stores them away in a book.(i wont say the whole process of it, coz then it will be a spoiler).This book is divided into 3 parts with going back & forth from present to past to present again.

This again is a story of star- crossed lovers with a unique setting of victorian era and an altogether different concept. This won’t be a yet another repetitive Story. Here, we have a son of a poor farmer, Emmett and a privileged rich boy Lucian Darnay. Here, in this world, books are forbidden and feared, Emmett farmer has never seen a book in his life, but once when in a fair he encounters a bookstall he is drawn to it & when he reads a book he is engulfed in it. His parents are angry on him for reading it but later when a letter arrives asking him to be an apprentice to a binder, his parents force him to go . What possibly would have happened that his parents who hated books & binding force him to go? That’s for you to find out. Emmett finds himself in an isolated place in a middle of nowhere with his only companion & teacher, Seredith. These he learns not the main task of binding memories but other small tasks of binding & finishing books. And once when a strange young boy named Lucian Darnay comes inthe bindery, Emmet feels intrigued & uncomfortable by his looks; as if he knows him. Plot then shifts back to the time when Emmett & his sister Alta had been carefree young children and to the time they had first encountered Lucian Darnay , the development of their relations. We see how Seredith is a moral bookbinder and keeps the books safe in her locker. And how other binders are corrupt and compromise with others binding by selling them to the rich people. Read to know how among these people you see the story of Emmett & Lucian unfold. How in the end their love defy the societal norms.

This was quite an unusual story. The concept of the novel makes it’s more interesting, as we find how even after the loss of memory, one can find their loved ones,if they are Strong & passionate enough. This story is about hope, about love without boundaries and it shows us that maybe forgetting the memory is a good option but learning to live with them is what life is all about. And these memories are an important part of our life. Getting rid of them wont do us any good but end up creating hole in our heart.