Book 11: The Binding by Bridget Collins

This is a really lovely gothic novel that uses point of view and unreliable narrator in a really effective way to tell a story. I don't actually want to say too much about it - the set up is that after suffering from a mysterious illness, a young man named Emmett Farmer is sent away from his family farm to be an apprentice for a book binder. Books hold a different power in this universe than they do in reality, but we learn what that power is in bits and pieces, and the binder Seredith feels more like a witch than strictly an artisan. And then a whole bunch of other things happen! It is a book that's well worth reading, but I also don't want to share too much, because it is a book that I think benefits from being read with only a single beam of light illuminating the way. I came away from it wanting more, but not necessarily a sequel: just that it ends with a new beginning that the characters work so hard to achieve.

Grade: A