The Binding

The Binding by Bridget Collins

This may be an unpopular review, but this book was pretty 'meh' for me. It had so much potential, the premise of the book binding and what goes into that and how it makes books valuable/dangerous is really interesting and really could have gone somewhere. . . instead it went a bit trope-y with sexual abuse. Very problematic sexual abuse like pedophilia, denying victims' agency and ick. The description of the book asks what you would do if you could erase grief, so I expected us to get into a discussion about grief and loss. Sexual trauma does not equal grief. I get that the author was trying to depict certain practices around the corruption of the book binding power as monstrous, I just wish that it wasn't at the expense of the majority of our few female characters. Which also means this book DEFINITELY does not pass the Bechdel test either.

Ok, so now I got what I didn't like out of my system, here's what was good about the book: It's mostly a queer romance (and there's no sexual violence in that relationship, which is also good), and that's definitely an important kind of representation. And as I said before, all that goes into book binding is really interesting. There's one book binder in particular named Seredith who is a great character. She's sassy and interesting and does things the old way - read: the right, uncorrupt way - even if it's not popular anymore. (And if she had managed to have a single conversation with another woman about something other than what a man had done to her, we may have passed the Bechdel test).

This book is more magical realism than fantasy, because the only really magical element is the book binding. I'm not going to discourage anyone from reading it because it wasn't terrible. But, in my opinion, it wasn't great either, and for the amount of buzz I'd been seeing, I expected more.