The Thread That Binds (Eternal Library #1) by Cedar McCloud
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Nonbinary aromantic asexual MC; nonbinary asexual MC; brown pansexual MC; queerplatonic NB/NB; NB/F; secondary NB/NB
PoV: First-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B0DWVSBJSW
Goodreads

The books are restless. At the Eternal Library, books are more than the paper, ink, and thread they're made from--they're full of spirits. Only a handful of people will ever be invited to the Bindery to learn the craft of etheric bookbinding: the creation of intricate illuminated manuscripts, Bound with a secret that will make them last forever.

Tabby is a dreamwalker, a witch who escapes into the stories of sleep to avoid a birth family that's never loved em enough. Amane is a cartomancer, a medium who speaks for the Unseen, but doesn't know how to speak for her own needs. Rhiannon is highly psychic, an archivist who can See into the past, but only has eyes on the future.

Their stories intertwine as they discover the secrets of etheric binding, the Library's archives, and those of their mentors--the three of whom are competing to be the next Head Librarian, the Speaker for all the books. How do you know who's truly worth being part of your family? Sometimes we must forge connections in order to heal; other times, those bonds must be broken.

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~making magic books!
~what if libraries were a religion
~ghosts are quite chatty actually
~divination and dream-walking
~many original fairytales

Cedar McCloud is an author I first discovered through their artwork back when they were working on their stunning Numinous Tarot (still one of my favourite decks!) Later, when they were creating their Threadbound Oracle, I followed that project too – and was VERY intrigued when they revealed that they had written a novel inspired by and entwined with the oracle! I backed both when they came to Kickstarter, obviously.

Alas, I bounced off Thread That Binds a few times. But then the New Voices book club on r/Fantasy chose it as their read for August this year, so I tried again – and was completely hooked!

I’m never 100% sure what cozy fantasy means, but plenty of others have said Thread That Binds falls under that category, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for here. There’s no saving-the-world plot, but the stakes certainly feel high for all our characters, and I spent a lot of the book much more anxious than I thought I’d be! But there’s a lovely unhurried pace to most of it, a dreamy kind of sweetness; I used Thread That Binds as a bedtime book, something to read while winding down for the night, and that worked wonderfully (aside from a few of the more nail-biting chapters here and there!)

Some quick worldbuilding, for context: the world of the Threadverse is a fantasy one, but it has a similar level of technology to ours, with magical equivalents of mobile phones and the internet and the like. Thread That Binds is set in the country Caspora, which has no concept of gender and everyone uses e/em pronouns by default; only a very rare few, and immigrants from elsewhere, use other pronouns. Caspora houses the world-famous Eternal Library, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a magical library that seeks to house and preserve a copy of every book ever written. A tiny but sacred department within the Library is the Bindery, where the rare, very magical, and indestructible Illuminated books are created by hand. The only way to learn Illumination is via a long and secretive apprenticeship, and apprenticeships don’t come along very often.

But one of the Illuminators has decided it’s time to take on an apprentice, and Tabby (e/em) and Amane (she/her) are both interviewing for the spot in the opening chapters. It’s an even bigger deal than it would otherwise be, because while most Illuminators leave for other libraries after their apprenticeships, whoever gets this one will gain a permanent position at the Eternal Library – the dream of every would-be Illuminator. Rhiannon (e/em), Tabby’s platonic partner, already works at the Eternal Library as an archivist, and gets bumped up to Assistant Head Archivist when the previous one quits – meaning e now works directly for and with Mairead, the charismatic, mercurial Head Archivist.

The book switches between Tabby, Amane and Rhiannon’s PoVs, and McCloud does an excellent job at giving each of them a distinctive voice and perspective on life, each other, and the Library. Tabby is a dreamwalker who struggles with stress-induced narcolepsy, the child of dysfunctional parents; e and Rhiannon live together as platonic partners. Rhiannon has what seems like a stronger, maybe more abrasive personality; e protects Tabby from Tabby’s parents as much as possible, but has eir own insecurities around having been a Gifted Child who feels e has little to show for it – and is very unsensitive to magic, which makes em blind to much of what makes the Eternal Library such a special place. Amane is an intense perfectionist, who uses the oracle deck handed down through her family to access her psychic abilities; she’s also not a native of Caspora, and has to adjust to the language and culture of her new home a fair bit.

A huge part of the story is not just the relationships between the three protagonists, but also each of their relationships with their respective mentors. Tabby apprentices with Binder Aeronwy; Amane with another Binder, and Aeronwy’s spouse, June; and Rhiannon is taken under the wing of eir boss, Mairead. Aeronwy and June both work hard, in their different styles, to connect with their apprentices and help them grow both as Binders and as individuals; Mairead, on the other hand, is deeply manipulative and toxic, good at twisting scenarios and words so that nothing is ever eir fault. Which is pretty ironic, considering that Mairead is a priestex of a religion that believes people are characters in a divine story – and that some people are protagonists, while others are npcs. (There’s a level of meta there that feels delightfully tongue-in-cheek!) Mairead is sure that e is a protagonist…and yet, somehow, nothing that happens could ever be a consequence of eir own actions. E is always done to, never doing. Sounds pretty npc to me!

Mairead is the kind of small-scale villain who is unfortunately believable, and who made my skin crawl whenever e appeared; I suspect most readers will have at least brushed up against similar personalities, and it’s easy to see how Rhiannon gets as twisted up as e does by Mairead’s charisma and poisonous promises. The other pitfalls of the story are equally familiar, and just as authentic: Tabby’s struggles with eir parents, in particular, made me sick with tension even while my heart was breaking for em. On the flip side, the friendships forming between the main characters also rang true; they felt very organic, and low-key, in a way that I really liked. All of them grew over the course of the book; I wouldn’t call this a coming-of-age story, but the vibe reminded me of university, that point in your life when you’re legally an adult but still figuring out who you are and how to be a grown up – full of possibility, but also kinda terrifying.

Thread That Binds gets right what a lot of cosy fantasy seems to get wrong: the stakes are low, relatively speaking, but very high for the characters – and McCloud writes the tension of that really, really well. Sure, the villain is fairly obvious, and the gentleness of the book means you’re never in any doubt that the main characters will triumph. But neither of those kept McCloud from playing my emotions like a fiddle. I didn’t think I was going to get sucked into this; I thought it would be something to read when my brain was misbehaving, or right before bed. Instead, I ended up obsessed, and I’m still not sure how that happened!

The world McCloud’s created is quietly magical, a believable attempt at mortals building a utopia. (Meaning, not actually perfect, but a good try.) The magic reminded me a lot of Wiccan-esque magic, with lots of visualisation and minimal cinematics, the mechanics vague. It felt fairly mundane, to be honest, which is partly a reflection of how normalised magic is in this setting; there’s very little sense of it being anything unusual or special, most of the time. There are several faiths, with tensions between them; historical figures who are deities in one country but viewed as mortals in another. The dead aren’t gone forever; Amane speaks with, or for, ghosts all the time, and not only through her divination cards. There’s virtually no physical violence in this setting – but equally, that does mean that when there is, most people have no idea how to deal with it, and they struggle to deal with non-physical violence just as much as we do in our world. There’s magic-internet, and magic-social media, even. Given the cultural and global importance of the Eternal Library, there’s a great deal of book imagery worked into everything from religion to speech, which was a constant delight for me as a bookwyrm.

And of course, there’s Caspora’s lack of gender. I was frustrated by how much I struggled with this; not because of the way it’s written – I think it’s written very well! But even being nonbinary, which I am, doesn’t mean you’re automatically Enlightened enough to stop reflexively gendering people, and I had to struggle not to do that based on names and context clues. But that just made Thread That Binds good practice for me! McCloud’s approach to this was as realistic and believable as their utopia; instead of creating a nation of androgynous people, McCloud’s characters gleefully mix-and-match what we’d think of as gender markers; beards and dresses are a common combination, for example. I loved this so much, because yes! The vast majority of nonbinary people aren’t androgynous in real life, and well-meaning allies don’t seem to realise what they’re implying when they write all their enby characters that way. McCloud instead works from the premise that none of these things have anything to do with gender; beards aren’t masculine, they’re just beards. Dresses aren’t feminine, they’re just dresses. Or perhaps they are masculine and feminine, but if they are then they don’t necessarily reflect the gender of the person wearing them. It’s a depiction that’s a breath of fresh air, honestly, and I’d like a lot of other storytellers to be taking notes, please!

The prose is quite simple, but each of the characters bring so much feeling and sincerity to their narration that the fairly straightforward writing didn’t bother me. Tabby and Amane and Rhiannon all felt so genuine – both in the sense that they’re incredibly easy to believe in, with the sorts of hopes and cares that are extremely familiar – but also in the sense of being…open and honest with the reader? That sounds ridiculous, but I don’t know how else to say what I mean. I felt that I knew these characters better than I’m used to knowing characters, that I knew them more deeply and completely than your typical protagonist. I can’t figure out how McCloud pulled that off, but it was wonderful!

The climax was probably the weakest part of the book – Tabby and Amane have to go through magical trials alongside their mentors, and the trials themselves made almost no sense to me, besides being pretty boring to read about. But that didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t really here for the big plot, I was here for the characters, who I adored, and the writing that soothed my brain-fizz and got me right in the Feels.

Thread That Binds…is like being hugged. Sometimes tighter, sometimes more loosely; sometimes rocking you gently, sometimes jumping up and down with excitement. I don’t know how else to put it.

I loved it, and can’t wait to dive into the next book in the series!

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