The Bind

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The book is written in third person, even so there is only one point of view, Jake's which puts the book on a more personal level. Ellin uses a clever ploy to give the reader information on the bad guys, Jake bugs several phones that he can listen in on even without a phone being active on a call. Prejudice--"The complication is that his father's been family doctor for the Thorens and us and lot of others around here for years. Fine doctor, nice, level headed guy who knows his place, enjoys a good Yid joke as much as anybody else--now how do you tell a man like that that his son just isn't wanted around here? Certainly not to be a papa to your grandchildren." In the story there is a secondary plot line, a romance that is slow to develop-just the right speed. 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. In the second half, we’re led through a series of plot twists that transform the central metaphor into something more profound. It turns out that binding is not just about selective amnesia, it’s about how people can be compelled to forget the crimes of the powerful, and how sin is defined by enforced silence. It is society that makes it unsafe for us to fully know ourselves. Thus The Binding becomes a parable of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and the #MeToo movement, one that makes it clear that even our memories can be colonised. The victims of this arrangement, such as Emmett, are left in a permanent state of dissociation, with the feeling of being responsible for an unnamed crime for which they will never be forgiven.

What didn't like was all the adverbs, tons of them. And they are also used in the dialogue as well which for me is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Not believable either was the premise that this whole story was built on whether insurance money was or wasn’t due Mrs. Thoren. Thousands of dollars of Jake’s fee were spent along the way for Elinor’s and Magnes’s services, so much so that there would have been very little left. The love story was lame at best. It’s very one-sided with needy Elinor hanging on Jake – yup, a real eye-roller – and he’s continually brushing her off. He treats her like crap, yet she hangs on, claiming to love him. If Mr. Ellin is trying to give the impression that she’s a ditzy, dumb blond, he is very successful.