Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Binding

This book took about a hundred pages to get going, but once it did I was totally hooked. The fantasy aspect of this was fascinating and required a big shift for me - the worldbuilding required the reader to see books as a violation of someone's emotional privacy, and it was very strange for me to imagine books as a bad thing. I liked it, though! The love story was also beautiful and heartbreaking, and I fell in love with Emmett fast.

My two points of contention are that I wish there hadn't been rather so much violence against women, and that I would have loved a deeper dive into the fantasy worldbuilding alongside the love story. However, this book was totally unputdownable once the first hundred pages had gone by, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Content Warnings

andreapap15's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

ylienna's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

greymalkin's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Writing is decent enough and I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the idea of what binders do. But wow does this book feel like it needs to have all the content warnings included.

I didn't much like any of the characters and the terrible abuse of all the female characters (not a single one is spared) was really upsetting. Especially as the male characters tended to be the abusers and awful people and for the most part had zero repercussions or punishment. I also wish that the book had lingered more on the actual bookbinding part instead of just a few descriptions of materials and tools that we never "see" used so we don't know what they do. Since the author has actually taken a lot of bookbinding classes I expected more but it felt more like what someone might add after an evening of googling and youtube videos. Since it was such a huge part of the magic system of the world, I wanted more details. All the bits about "trade" and fakes were intriguing but we never get to interact with them "onscreen". Humans are storytellers, how is that no one has written down stories before? If they didn't, then why isn't there more of an oral tradition? My questions really took me out of the book.

Content Warnings