The Binding

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Memories are a nice place to visit, but a terrible place to live,’ as someone once said. Memories, what we do with them and how they shape our lives, are central to The Binding , a darkly delicious, and above all, deeply romantic novel beautifully written by UK author, Bridget Collins. La autora nos sorprende con algunas cosas que no esperas, y aunque hay ocasiones en las que la historia pierda un poco de intriga, Bridget Collins te deja con ganas de seguir devorando el libro. So what happened after this point that had me feeling disappointed in this book? In parts two and three, the relationship between Emmett and Lucian dominated the story. I felt this was detrimental to the story at large and to the premise it was built on. I enjoyed their relationship, but the details of it became repetitive and drawn out, and very little about bookbinding was explored outside of their lives. The morality and philosophy of bookbinding would have made for an interesting discussion among the characters who might question their world a little more and get the reader thinking along with them. Instead, I was a bystander in the story, able to sympathize with the characters, but not able to fully immerse myself in all that was happening after part one. I wanted to see more of that world and have the peripheral characters better developed such as Emmett’s sister who only had one thing on her mind. Villainous characters, likewise, were one dimensional. It was as if the author had used all her energy on Emmett and Lucian and had little left over for much else besides describing the environment around them. In this, the writing is highly descriptive and often poetic, which is both a compliment and a complaint. On the positive side, the author is an expressive and extremely observant person who details her story in beautiful and surprising ways. As well, it’s a book about books: the m Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice – but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.

La ambientación es de las cosas que más me han gustado y sorprendido, gracias a su narración podemos sentirnos partes de la novela. Describe el ambiente, y las sensaciones de los personajes de forma inmejorable. Emmett is sent away by his parents to work as a Binder’s apprentice. If people want certain bad memories to be taken away they can visit a Binder and be ‘bound’. The resulting book is then kept safe so that the person will never have to relive the memories again. And what do these two fine male specimens do in this slightly dystopian, and unjust world? Do they fix or break the system? Do they try to alter the processes? Perhaps they attempt to straight some individual wrongs? The correct answer is: Nothing. They do nothing that transcends their personal entanglement. They can prevent a murder but they don’t bother in the end. They also terrorise an innocent maid threatening her with an abuse of the binding powers, but all for a good cause so don’t pay heed. This good cause is their own happiness which started with cheating on the sister and this is all the Binding is about. For first person narrative, the writing was surprisingly poignant and graceful. The atmosphere and setting was developed particularly well, I had no trouble establishing the world of The Binding in my head. A slow start, but I'm so glad to have continued The Binding, as I ended up really enjoying the rest of the story!The first is that the people whose memories are erased are not made whole again by their binding. It’s so complete a cleansing process that it leaves the participants as mere shells of their former selves. It takes away not just their memories but the essence of their character. They are no longer themselves. CW: There are some significant triggers in this book with some particularly distressing content. description of rape, rape of minor, sexual violence, homophobia, animal abuse/killing, traumatic scene where man is taunting a girl by detailing about how he had been sexually assaulting her and how she had cried etc (her memory had been repeatedly erased after periods of sexual abuse so he could start the cycle of abuse again), suicide, consensual sex.

The main thing that captivated me was the characters. Emmett was enticing in his mystery; I loved uncovering bits of his lost past in the same moments he did. The romance was heartbreaking and lovely, taking up a greater portion of this story than I could have anticipated. Thankfully it was well written and unraveled wonderfully! OK, so here we are: the novel is overtalked, there is nothing pro- about the ‘tagonist’ and thus the interesting setting and original idea is the last hope. Especially that the description promises a whole lot of things riding on the bookbinding concept. This whole bookbinding business is half-confession and half-lobotomy (with divine forgetting instead of divine forgiving); a process that erases part of the person and transfers it into a book. It is a fiendishly clever idea! I wanted to know more: where does this power come from? how does it work? why is it that Emmet is a powerful binder (what makes the person a powerful binder and what is the difference between a mediocre one? what is exactly his strength?) how does the binding happen? None of the above is answered and the last problem is dealt with ONE SENTENCE and it reads: “how it works is a mystery boy.” Bridget Collins’s fantasy novel, her first for adults, begins sombrely, with its teenage hero Emmett being sent away from his family farm to become an apprentice to a binder of books. He’s weak after a long illness of a mysterious nature and, from his family’s strained behaviour, we intuit that he’s in some kind of disgrace he doesn’t fully understand. When he arrives at the isolated house of Seredith, the elderly woman to whom he’s apprenticed, it’s both an exile and a haven. He spends his days learning to make endpapers, tool leather, gilding – the delicate physical labour of making beautiful books. But he soon realises that the true work of binding is magical, manifested in the way that lives are turned into stories.The characters are well-rounded, and the romance plot is something I do find myself rooting for. It’s easy to do, both Emmett and Lucian are sympathetic and appealing characters, and I enjoyed the chance to see each of them from the other’s perspective. I couldn't help but fall for Collins' well-written unreliable narrators, her eloquent magical prose, and the tender, fierce love story at the core of this novel." Bridget Collins has written seven books for young adults and has had two plays produced, one at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Bridget Collins imagines a world in which you engage the services of a book binder and whatever was causing you distress or pain can be erased from your memory. Your most traumatic memories are bound between the covers of a book and wiped clean away.

Stars - This was a hard decision but I am not convinced we needed the horrific descriptions of the painful memories as it was essentially a romance. For me it would have been enough to hint at the horror and then move on.Collins’ characters are just as well crafted. Emmett and Lucian’s emotional journeys are incredibly poignant. The way they’re eventually brought together developed slowly but sweetly and beautifully. The secondary characters stand out because they’re just as complex, especially Seredith and Emmett’s family. Meanwhile the villains of the book are revolting; Collins makes no attempt to have her audience sympathise with them. The book starts strongly with Emmett, the teenage son of a farmer, apprenticed to Seredith, an old binder who lives on the edge of a marsh. Just as he is settling into his new life and learning his trade, he makes a discovery – one of the books in her bindery vault bears his name. 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 amongst their small community, but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. En conclusión os diré que es un libro que me ha gustado en rasgos generales, que tiene un final que deja puertas abiertas a una segunda parte (que no sé si se realizará) y que a mi modo de ver tiene una primera parte asombrosa y majestuosa que me ha fascinado. Montverre is first seen through the eyes of a gothic character known only as The Rat: rapacious, fearful, famished, and possibly not a rat at all. “Tonight the moonlight makes the floor of the Great Hall into a game board.” The Rat observes an anomalous figure in white, the “female-male, the odd one out” wandering in the shadows. By a fluke, a brilliant woman, Claire Dryden, has been appointed Magister Ludi, Master of the Game.

Which was worse? To feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered? Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point? And yet that numbness would take part of your self away, it would be like pins and needles in your soul… 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. In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books and memories are meticulously stored and recorded.This is a mysterious story, one that brings together love in the case of Emmett and Lucien. It is a story of family, of mystery, and of how our memories erased can change exactly who we are and how we face the future unknowing of the dangers that have been erased. There are times in life we all go through painful things, things we wish hadn't happened, and which make us sad and anxious, or worse, to remember. What if you could have those memories removed? What if you could choose what you remember, to keep the good and get rid of the bad? The Binding is many things: a story about the literal power of books; the power memory wields over us and our sense of identity; the perils of consumerism when it’s something personal to you that’s the commodity; that what binds us together can set us free as well as tear us apart: learning to know and accept yourself, and others, for who they are and an unapologetically romantic love story. All of which have combined to make it one of the bestselling titles of 2019, an epithet it’s definitely worthy of!