What would you do if you had the opportunity to forget every bad thing that happened to you? To forget your past misdeeds, or even coerce those you had wronged to give up any memory they have of being mistreated by you? All to be contained in a book, these memories would either sit on the shelves of voyeurs, or be locked away forever. The Binding brings up these sorts of ethical questions, never completely examining them beyond their surface level, but maybe that's meant to be more of the reader's journey than the characters.' Around the halfway mark, the story shifts from being an alternative history/slight dystopian focusing on Emmett's apprenticeship as a binder to a romance story. I didn't really mind this change, as I liked the somewhat vague worldbuilding, and it puts the first half of the book in a completely new context. It also places Emmett in the interesting position of an unreliable narrator that has no idea of his unreliability. 

Though I was satisfied to where the story went, it felt like this book could have done a more coherent job of tying together all its narrative threads. This books contains three parts, one told in Emmett's POV in the present, the second in the past, and the third following the present from another character's POV. With the binding being a more prevalent aspect in the first part, and the romance in the second, it would be natural to tie the two together in that third act, but one clearly has more time devoted to it than the other. It makes the theming somewhat unbalanced. We do get a better idea of how the binding process affects society and certain economic classes, while also getting a bit more of the morality and consequences of it, but not a whole lot more that what we've already been given. 

The romance is at least pretty sweet. I can definitely see the chemistry between the two characters and I do ultimately want them to get together. How much you enjoy this book will depend on which aspect you want more out of the story. It's a dark, emotional, bittersweet read, one that will immediately suck you in with all its moral complexities and mysteries.