This book is absolutely spell-binding, in so many ways!

It follows the story of Emmett, a farmer’s son who is summoned to be an apprentice for a binder – a woman who removes people’s most terrible memories and binds those memories into a book, which she then locks away in a vault to protect them forever.

Emmett isn’t entirely certain why he’s been called to do such a task, and finds that people view the ‘job’ of binding as either helpful, or terrible. Books themselves are seen as terrible things, because each one is the genuine memories of a person, who can no longer access those memories themselves, and generally people only go to a Binder because their memories are so terrible they can barely live under the weight of them.

But then the binder dies, and Emmett discovers one of the books in her vault has his name on it.

What was so awful he chose to have it’s memory wiped from his mind forever?

There is so much to love about this story, but I feel that to share those snippets might give away some of the storyline, and one of the things I loved was how the story took a turn I wasn’t really expecting  beforehand, and how beautiful that storyline turned out to be.