Binding 13 - Chloe Walsh

Rating:

This review may contain spoilers. Binding 13 left me as Johnny, blue-balled, but not for sex but for the plot.

This book narrates the story of Shannon (like the river) Lynch and Johnny Kavanaugh, two students from opposite backgrounds who fall in love in school. The trope is basically a damsel in distress and her white knight, set in the 2000s.

Shannon's character

Shannon has a difficult life: she has been bullied since elementary school, suffering from emotional and physical abuse. However, her real executioner is her father, an alcoholic, unemployed, and pathetic man who is enabled by Shannon's mother, a woman without self-respect and care for her many children. In a family of eight, Shannon relies the most on Joey, the second child of this shameful marriage (and best character IMO).

Our female protagonist has learned how to deal with her father and act accordingly; she avoids talking with him, being around his presence, and, whenever he wants, being his punchbag. Joey always helps Shannon every time he can, but the situation in her previous public school is unbearable. For this reason, she joins the private school of Tommen.

Johnny's character

I don't have much to say about Johnny besides that he is a rich, obsessed, and egoistic teenager whose whole life spins around his broken penis and his promising rugby career.

As soon as the character started talking about women, I knew I wasn't going to like him. The author tells us that he has been sleeping around since he was 14 years old and always with older women, often adults (hello????? why has nobody called the police?????)

When he met Shannon, he started stalking her, stealing her school records, and punching first, asking second anyone who attempted to hurt her. However, from my point of view, he didn't really prioritize her over rugby.

My opinion about the book

Don't get me wrong, I liked this book. However, I believe it failed the main plots and hence, what I was expecting about it.

Set in a school where rugby is everything, Johnny only played like two matches in 900 pages.

Shannon doesn't have character development. Everyone in her new school seems to like her or have neutral thoughts on her besides Bella (who is not a real villain, just another spoiled teenager whose worst crime in this book was calling Shannon a slut), but she still acts like she is being persecuted or something. I understand that PTSD is real, but even by the end of the book, despite the advice Joey repeated every single time, she never stood up for herself and never fought back her father. She never got self-confidence, never gained trust in others.

Compared to Shannon's, Johnny's struggle makes no sense. He had all the economic means, time, family, and friend support in the world to heal properly and get back on track to his rugby career but still decided to jeopardize his health and future (not only in sports but also in life).

Honestly, if this book were focused only on Shannon's life and family, it would be more interesting. Learning more about her mother's past; getting to know Darren and his struggles as a gay man with a homophobic father; Joey and his relationship with Aoife; someone sending his asshole father to jail, pretty please; and overall, Shannon's dealing with trauma and healing from it.

This book could definitely be shorter; too many chapters talk about Johnny's dick and "determination" in rugby and too little about more interesting topics and characters. I liked the end's cliffhanger, but I won't read another 900 pages from this author just to discover what happened next. In a few words, Binding 13 is good if you are a teenager and ok-ish if you are a grown woman, such as myself.