Review by New York Times Review
OF COURSE, books don't need to be turned into magical artifacts. They already are. Telepathy, mind control, time travel: These are all just exaggerations of the power books actually have. The ability to set your memories down for safekeeping (or for unsafekeeping, if the book you write falls into the wrong hands) is entirely real. The magic of Bridget Collins's novel "The Binding," in which gifted craftsmen are able to remove those memories entirely and create books full of captured experiences, is only a step away from that reality. Collins's vivid descriptions of the abuse of that magic within a grimy faux-Victorian-era world of workhouses and exploitation are almost too painfully true. We can easily recognize her grotesquely vampiric aristocrats: They are more and not less terrifying because they don't have any supernatural powers of their own. In fact, they're barely removed from the venture capitalists of today's world, funding tired, redeyed coders to cast their spells into the night, building waves of disruption that swamp vast swaths of lives. Vampires may be unable to enter a house without permission, but nowadays the consent required to bind someone's memories is as meaningful as the "O.K." we tick on one obligatory service agreement after another. Within the world of "The Binding," affection becomes gossamer fragile: Is it possible to love when that love can be so trivially erased? The most horrifying of the novel's victims is the starving mother of three who doesn't recognize her own children because all she had to sell were her memories of loving them. Now she wants nothing but to sell what little she has left and be emptied. Yet she's only one of a hopeless many, their desperate condition a threat yawning beneath those just one or two creaky steps up the rungs of the social ladder. It's fitting that the story of love Collins builds in this world is one that must pass through the violence of binding - and that it survives this violence almost entirely by chance. The moving force that saves it is the novel's protagonist, Emmett Farmer, a novice bookbinder learning to cope with a gift he doesn't want but can't refuse. His struggling courage is the leaven that raises the novel, and his slowly emerging romance with Lucian Darnay, the son of a gentleman, also has a quality I've found more often in fan fiction than in the mainstream, particularly in the subgenre known as "slash": not because both characters are male but because both characters are given the power to move the plot, the world and each other. It's always easier to bring together two characters when one is driven by the other's story, which is why so many love interests acquire a footnote quality. But Darnay's story is distinct from Emmett's, and, if anything, his weaknesses drive the narrative more than Emmett's strengths. Other characters do wind up as footnotes: Emmett's sister is an uneasy shape in the narrative, a giggling girl who occasionally emerges as a deliberate schemer in order, it seems, to soften the real harm done to her by Emmett and his lover, to make them less guilty. Darnay's father, on the other hand, is difficult to swallow not because he isn't believable - entirely the opposite - but because he's so monstrous it's hard to imagine any child of his not being damaged far worse and far younger than Lucian seems to have been. Nevertheless, "The Binding" succeeds in creating the magic it proposes: the experience of memory returning, a rush of recollection that can change the whole world, if only for one person at a time - or sometimes two. NAOMI NOVIK'S most recent novel is "Spinning Silver."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Collins' first foray into adult fiction presents an alternate world reminiscent of nineteenth-century England, brimming with correctness and repression, where books are literally made from memories. Binding is not just the craft of making an elegant tome but also the art of taking away selected recollections to help a person forget pain, grief, or a terrible secret. Emmett, a young apprentice binder, learns the craft from the elderly Seredith but also learns that many despise binders, believing they take a piece of a person's soul. He has been taught that a binder cannot steal anything, the memory must be offered freely, but there are unscrupulous buyers who sell volumes for personal profit, and even a binder can be bound. Emmett and an aristocrat's son unknowingly share a secret one that could destroy them both. Using evocative language to express a lovingly told tale of lost memories, Collins wraps her story of a passionate, forbidden relationship in mystery and magic.--Lucy Lockley Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Collins's solid first adult novel (following several YA novels) is a haunted, Dickensian fantasia. At the story's outset, teenage Emmett is a farmer's son in an alternate England at an indeterminate point in the past whose mind is riddled with gaps due to an unspecified illness. He receives a letter that calls him for an apprenticeship with a bookbinder, Seredith, who's reputed to be a witch. Emmett quickly discovers that Seredith is not your run-of-the-mill bookbinder: she draws traumatic memories out of people's minds and hides them away in books, thereby removing the memories from their minds. The first client Emmett meets is a man named Lucian Darnay; their encounters unsettle and even enrage both of them, but neither knows why. Emmett eventually discovers there is a book with his name on it, and it holds an essential secret about him. The relationship between Emmett and Lucian plays out satisfyingly, but the novel suffers from portentous conversations and a few plot points that the characters don't realistically react to. Emmett is a YA protagonist, too-sullen, reluctant, wrapped in victimhood. This is an enjoyable novel for readers of any age, but the story remains YA at its heart. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. VERDICT With astonishing unpredictability, YA novelist Collins enters the adult arena with a spellbinding blend of history, mystery and fantasy. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/18.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Collins' dystopian novel is set in an alternate England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.In the absence of specific dates, this novel suggests its period with various clues: small farms, no plumbing, gaslight, horse-drawn carriages, factories but no trains. The backdrop is a Crusade that, indeterminate decades ago, caused books to be, if not entirely forbidden, then tightly regulated and socially taboo. Emmett is sent by his farmer parents to be apprenticed to an elderly Bookbinder named Seredith, who practices her craft in an isolated house near a marsh. Recently, Emmett suffered an illness which marked him as unfit for anything but binding, which, he rapidly learns, means more than handcrafting books. Customers come to Seredith to have their memories wiped of disturbing experiences through confessions she then enshrines in beautifully bound books and locks up. One such patron/patient is Lucian, a young gentleman who will figureor has figured; we won't know until latersignificantly in Emmett's life. There is a brisk underground trade in true bindings, as opposed to mere novels, and unscrupulous binders exploit this market. Among them is Mr. de Havilland, Seredith's son, who, after her suspicious death, appropriates her stock of secret bindings, which, like loaded guns, will make explosive appearances later. He also takes charge of Emmett. The middle section, in which Emmett is back on the farm with his parents and his sister, Alta, is a flashback in which we learn the source of Emmett's ailment and also more about the peasant culture that seems to hearken back to Britain's pre-Christian age. Except for the fact that a corrupt binder's wares play a role, the concluding section, told from Lucian's point of view, presents a mostly fact-based dystopia of Victorian aristocracy and its excesses. The worldview of this novel is bleak, but readers will not fail to appreciate the many sly analogies to the true-story-obsessed publishing world of today.Though set in an alternate universe, Collins' fictional world rings very true. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
