The People Yearn for One Tree Hill
Binding 13 and the very slow burn
Welcome back to Romancing the Phone! This week, your intrepid reporter read Binding 13, a romance (?) I’ve seen all over BookTok and never known anything about. It took me reading this book to realize 13 was a jersey number. I’m here to share what I’ve learned ahead of the hotly anticipated release of the sixth book in the Boys of Tommen series, Releasing 10. But if you want to catch up before May 27, you better start now - these books are LONG.
Next on my TBR? The two books that are dominating BookTok this week: Silver Elite (a dystopian romance I called out as the next big thing in my Q1 trend report) and Shield of Sparrows (a new romantasy by fan favorite author Devney Perry that is set to get a film adaptation written by the John Wick screenwriter?).
And finally, before we dive in, I was a guest on The Beautiful and Banned podcast this week to talk about ACOTAR (it was very fun! rereading ACOTAR in the year of our lord 2025 was enlightening!).
Is Binding 13 a Sports Romance?
No.
But Alyssa, you might wonder, isn’t this book about a rugby player? Yes it is, and I would say it pretty realistically delves into the routines and sacrifices elite level athletes must make in order to succeed, much more so than something like Icebreaker or the Windy City series. My counter to you is, would you call One Tree Hill a basketball romance?
Binding 13 is a heart-wrenching, Ireland-set slow burn romance set at an Irish secondary school. Our FMC, Shannon, has transferred to the local private school, Tommen, after years of relentless bullying at public school. She’s 15, she’s tiny, and she’s stressed. Our MMC, Johnny, is a rugby star who is set to play for Ireland in the future - if he can just survive his last few years of schooling. He’s 17, he’s huge, and he’s stressed. Oh, and it’s 2005.
One of my qualms starting this book was the age of the characters - I don’t really want to read a romance about a 15 year old. Shannon turns 16 during the book, but I still felt a little ick about it.
Also, reader beware: this book deals very deeply and intensely with themes of domestic violence and abuse. Please check trigger warnings before you start.
On Shannon’s first day, Johnny accidentally hits her in the head with a rugby ball and gives her a concussion. Did I mention she’s tiny? The book will mention this approximately one million times.
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From there, we embark upon a slow burn journey reminiscent of CW teen dramas of the late nineties and early 2000s. I really do think a big reason this series is so popular is because it’s filling a vacuum. What do teens today have, besides The Summer I Turned Pretty? The people yearn for One Tree Hill. And when I say slow burn, I mean SLOW BURN:
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Something I wasn’t expecting: throughout the book, Johnny is suffering from a severe groin injury. I cannot stress to you enough how much of this book is about groin issues.
“Without another word, Joey turned around and walked away, leaving me standing in the doorway, staring after him with only two things on my mind. The first: finding an ice pack for my balls. The second: fantasizing about all the terribly inappropriate things I longed to do with his sister.”
Shannon is also an anxiety puker. As a fellow stress puker, I can relate, but this was a lot.
Some questions I asked myself as I read this book included do these kids ever go to class? So I’d say it’s doing an excellent job carrying the mantle of its forebearers (Dawson’s Creek and Degrassi).
A quick note about covers: as usual, I think a large part of the success of these books is the fact that they have distinctive covers (that convey absolutely nothing about the series):
These catch your eye! They aren’t cartoons! If you’re reading a physical copy of this, no one will have any clue what it’s about!
I went hunting around on Publisher’s Marketplace to see if anyone had bought the film rights (they haven’t been announced if they have been bought), and found the original deal language, which described this book as Twilight without vampires but with rugby. It is always cold and rainy and Shannon is a normal girl who every boy is in love with and is also very clumsy, so in that respect, sure. Otherwise, I would not compare this book to Twilight. I think it’s something more like, what if Normal People was a soap opera?
This is a perfect crying on BookTok book - it’s extremely sad and, despite being 600 pages long as previously stated, ends on a cliffhanger that literally has readers racing to the bookstore for the next book in the series. This is a genre of BookTok video - there were dozens of these:
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Binding 13 was first released in 2018, but these books are having a real moment right now. Most of the BookTok videos I found for this post were from the past year or so, and many from the past few months. This makes sense. As we’ve been talking about all year, what a lot of people on BookTok are seeking from their reading right now is catharsis. And what these books are designed for is targeted emotional devastation.
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This book is out here breaking teenagers’ hearts and destroying peoples’ lives:
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Binding 13 has entered the rare echelon of BookTok books that are so popular, creators make meme videos about them:
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Appropriately, the book includes a playlist at the end, so half of the TikToks about the book are soundtracked by She Will Be Loved by Maroon 5 or Gold Digger by Kanye West.
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One-star Goodreads review:
“i could make a drinking game of how many times
a) shannon's called tiny
b) johnny talks abt his dick
but i'd die of alcohol poisoning”-౨ৎ
Five-star Goodreads review:
“This book feels like a warm hug. Which might sound strange as it covers some heavy themes.
For me it comes down to how genuine everything in this book is.
It feels like life; real, a bit heartbreaking at times and the best when surrounded with people you love.”-Gry ☾
It took me a long time to get into this book, but I was sort of riveted for the last 100 pages. Read this if you like a high school soap opera, an Irish accent, a slow burn, or gross jock teenage boys.
If you enjoy this series, I think you’ll also enjoy the works of Mariana Zapata - the queen of the slow burn sports romance. The only other series that came to mind for me when reading this was, weirdly, Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging - lots of early-aughts British chaos and teenage anxiety in that one, but obviously much sillier.
Was this helpful? What book that is all over BookTok should I read next?
Imaginary Celebrity Book Club
In real celebrity book news, Emma Roberts, Zosia Mamet, and Carley Fortune are among the judges for a $100,000 prize for debut authors.
Also, no fewer than 4 people sent me this story about NHL bad boy Sean Avery’s new co-written hockey romance novel.
KEEP IT. Were there no other hockey players who wanted to write a romance novel? This ties to another thread we’ve been tracing since this newsletter started: men realizing that romance is profitable and nakedly trying to cash in themselves.
On that note!
xoxo
Update--I inhaled the first four books (2500+ pages) in one week (to be fair I was on vacation) and am feral for the remaining two. Burrowing into these melodramatic teens' psyches was exactly the escapism I needed right now. Could each of the two duets have been a single shorter than 600 page book? Absolutely yes. Do I want them to be? Absolutely no.
I’m reading this late, but it looks like there’s been quite a controversy about Releasing 10 and she’s posted a fairly long response video (I saw it in Instagram). I don’t know all the nuances, but I saw someone call it “trauma porn” and apparently there were no content/trigger warnings.