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nehaanna 's review for:
The Bookbinder
by Pip Williams
This book had a lot going for it until 2/3rds of the way in and it began to collapse in on itself. On the surface the premise is interesting, the characters engaging, the plot intriguing.
But then the main character, Peggy, decides to try to get into Oxford as one of the early women scholars in England, and the story turns into nothing more than a bunch of rote and tiresome praise of the classics, Ancient Greek and Latin, and English literature. It doesn’t help that the main character also somehow devolves into the worst version of herself and begins to be necessarily rude and selfish with other people on her life. She continues this pattern of behavior by knowingly engaging one of her friends in a debate about women suffrage in Britain and tries to gaslight her friend (and readers) into feigning pity for her. This pattern of poor coping continues through the rest of the book and is often taken out on her sister, who has some unnamed intellectual disability or neurodivergence, and readers are just expected to empathize with this character?
Beyond this otherwise extremely aggravating protagonist, the writing style is quite dry. There are a lot of instances where there is extremely verbose descriptive passages that don’t add anything to the story, and drag it out. The writing quality really suffers the most with some jarring intimacy scenes that have no context and are quite frankly cringeworthy. I can tell the author has done significant research to try and cover so much in this plot but in the attempt to cram all that information in, the book starts to read like a history book formatted in a narrative.
I came into this work with some high hopes so I’m pretty disappointed with how this book panned out. I definitely feel like I wasted some time getting through this book and I’ll be a pretty forgettable read for me.
But then the main character, Peggy, decides to try to get into Oxford as one of the early women scholars in England, and the story turns into nothing more than a bunch of rote and tiresome praise of the classics, Ancient Greek and Latin, and English literature. It doesn’t help that the main character also somehow devolves into the worst version of herself and begins to be necessarily rude and selfish with other people on her life. She continues this pattern of behavior by knowingly engaging one of her friends in a debate about women suffrage in Britain and tries to gaslight her friend (and readers) into feigning pity for her. This pattern of poor coping continues through the rest of the book and is often taken out on her sister, who has some unnamed intellectual disability or neurodivergence, and readers are just expected to empathize with this character?
Beyond this otherwise extremely aggravating protagonist, the writing style is quite dry. There are a lot of instances where there is extremely verbose descriptive passages that don’t add anything to the story, and drag it out. The writing quality really suffers the most with some jarring intimacy scenes that have no context and are quite frankly cringeworthy. I can tell the author has done significant research to try and cover so much in this plot but in the attempt to cram all that information in, the book starts to read like a history book formatted in a narrative.
I came into this work with some high hopes so I’m pretty disappointed with how this book panned out. I definitely feel like I wasted some time getting through this book and I’ll be a pretty forgettable read for me.