The BOOKBINDER'S SECRET
A.D. BELL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Every book tells a story. This one tells a secret.
A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder.
Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father’s failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man’s profession. But when she’s given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.
Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.
Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian’s world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I was suckered in by "forbidden love" in the description. It does not mean queer love. It means a girl of "gentle birth" (SOMEone's never been in a delivery room, there is not one single thing gentle about birth) falling for a lower-class boy, being thwarted in her desire for him, and the very tedious and predictable consequences thereof.
All of this features in the mystery the young bookbinder's apprentice is required to solve by her...compulsion, I guess...to have some control over something in her life. Her status as a 1901, so transition between Victorian and Edwardian, woman means she's hemmed in on all sides in spite of being her antiquarian-bookseller father's heir and an apprentice bookbinder of significant skill.
She is, in other words, that most dangerous of people: One who knows just enough to know she is second-class by other people's designs. Those are the people who foment revolution, who commit violent crimes, who rise up for their own benefit. Lily's many steps above her peers because she's got a (failing?) business coming to her, she's learning a skilled trade, and by and large is left to her own devices to live her life as she sees fit.
Which leads me to that missing star. Lily has two suitors and pursues relationships with each unremarked on...in 1901. It's the unremarked on that is the bridge too far in straining my suspension of disbelief. She'd have A Reputation, be called names, be gossiped about. As we're never in the men's company for long enough to form our own opinion about them, at least the gossiping neighbors could've filled us in. Also, the mystery is set in 1851...how did it end? Why do I care if a mid-Victorian pairing gets consummated? For that matter, why does Lily, except to distract herself from the unsatisfying life she's leading?
I liked very much the bookbinding bits. I honestly got invested in Lily's struggles with discovering clues, being perfectly willing to lie and steal to acquire them; but also was sure this would not have gone unremarked in her small professional world. For all of my willingness to meet the book halfway, this was my quarter-star docking point. In the future installments of the series this is clearly meant to be I hope some judicious pruning will cut some redundancies, some peril will attach to Lily's unconventional lifestyle, and her men will either be more present or at least gossiped about.
