Binding 13

I put off Binding 13 for months because of the page count and the noise around it. Every other video seemed to be someone crying over Johnny Kavanagh or saying they had to sleep after Shannon Lynch. I finally started it on a quiet weekend, expecting a standard sports romance. What I got was something longer and heavier, set in Cork, Ireland, told in two voices, and hard to walk away from once the school part settles in.

This is Chloe Walsh's 2018 novel, the first in the Boys of Tommen series. I read it in the Bloom Books print edition, which runs 624 pages. The edition most people buy now is that 2023 reissue, after the book first appeared self published in 2018 and then found a huge audience a few years later. The story follows Johnny Kavanagh, seventeen and built up as Tommen College's rugby hope, and Shannon Lynch, fifteen and new to that school, trying to disappear. What follows tells the whole story in order, ending included, and it stops in the middle of their arc. You need Keeping 13 right after.

A quick note before the plot, because it matters here. This book includes sustained bullying, physical abuse at home, an alcoholic parent, anxiety and panic, and a sports injury that gets bloody at one point. Walsh does not linger to shock, but she does not look away either. If those subjects are raw for you right now, skip this one or wait. I will flag where the worst scenes sit so you can decide.

Johnny opens the book under pressure that would flatten most adults. He is captain at Tommen, an all star schoolboy player, talked about for higher squads and the Irish Rugby Academy path. Coaches, teammates, his dad, strangers in town, everyone seems to have a plan for his body. What almost no one knows is that he is playing hurt. He had surgery in December for a groin problem that never quite healed, and he is hiding how bad the pain still is. He tells himself he can manage it with physio and stubbornness. He lies to coaches about the pain scale. He gets short on the pitch when his leg gives out, which is not like him.

Shannon arrives at Tommen mid year from Ballylaggin, about fifteen miles away if I remember the bus talk right. Her mother took out a credit union loan to move her, after years of bullying at her old schools that started when Shannon was very small. Hair cut, photos taken without consent, beatings by groups of girls, teachers who did not stop it. Her older brother Joey, eighteen and a talented hurler for Cork minors, picked up suspensions defending her. The family could not keep her where she was. The hope is that a private school with stricter rules will let her be invisible for once.

Her first day ruins that plan in a way that is almost comic until it is not. She forgets her phone in the science block and cuts across the training pitches to save time. Johnny is in the middle of a terrible practice. He is fighting with teammates, he throws his mouthguard, his coach sends him off. In a flash of temper he kicks a ball hard without looking. It hits Shannon in the back of the head. She goes down a grassy bank and blacks out.

He runs to her, horrified. For a guy who is usually controlled, he panics. The school calls her mother. Her mother arrives furious and reads the whole thing as an attack, which I understood even if it was not fair to Johnny. The principal tells Johnny to keep his distance from Shannon. He feels guilty and angry at himself, so he leaves money in her locker, a hundred euros, which Shannon does not know what to do with. Then, because he is Johnny and does not leave things alone, he gets his best friend to help him see her confidential file.

The file and the new rule

That file scene tells you a lot about Tommen. Johnny talks the school secretary into letting Gerard Gibson, called Gibsie, lift Shannon's records. Gibsie is Johnny's best friend since childhood, a blond flanker, loud and crude and oddly tender when it counts. He walks his mother's cat on a leash. He cannot cook. He once pulled a disgusting prank in an opposing shower that the team still talks about. He also will cross lines for Johnny without blinking.

The file is fourteen pages of incident reports. Cut ponytails. Bathroom photos. Visits involving police. Johnny reads it and goes cold. He calls a team meeting and lays down a rule that no one talks about what happened to Shannon before Tommen and no one goes near her to hassle her. When Ronan McGarry, a younger player with a big mouth, makes a crude remark about her, Johnny pins him to a wall by the throat. The room goes quiet. No one tests him after that.

Shannon, meanwhile, settles in a way she did not expect. Weeks pass without taunts in hallways. No one trips her. No one posts photos. She suspects Johnny had something to do with the calm but she cannot prove it. She starts noticing him the way you notice someone you are trying not to notice. Between classes. At lunch. On the pitch from a distance. She hears through gossip that he had a casual arrangement with Bella Wilkinson, a sixth year, physical and now over. That stings more than she wants to admit.

Johnny notices her back. He spends an embarrassing amount of time trying to place the color of her eyes. Midnight blue is the closest he finds on some chart late at night, which made me laugh because it is such a teenage boy thing to do. He is also still hiding the injury. Nights with ice. Mornings where he cannot get going. Fear that one bad tackle will end the Academy dream. He tells himself no distractions, definitely no girlfriend. Then he keeps looking for Shannon in corridors.

Two houses

The contrast between their homes drives most of the book.

The Kavanaghs live in a big country house outside town. Dogs everywhere, including an elderly Labrador who snores through important moments and two golden retrievers who nearly knock Shannon over the first time she visits. Johnny's parents are present and warm, though his dad can be blunt about rugby. His mum fusses in a way that feels foreign to Shannon. There is food in the fridge. There are lifts to school. There is a couch where you can fall asleep without listening for footsteps.

The Lynch house is the opposite. Shannon's father is unemployed, drinking heavily, and violent. He uses money meant for the kids to drink. He calls Shannon names I will not repeat. He hits. Shannon's mother loves her kids but is worn down and often sides with keeping the peace rather than stopping him, which hurts to read. Joey, at eighteen, has become a sort of second parent. He works shifts at a petrol station, feeds his younger brothers, pays what bills he can, and steps between his father and Shannon when he is home. The younger boys, Tadhg at eleven and Ollie at nine, cope in different ways. Tadhg acts tough. Ollie runs for help.

Shannon hides bruises with makeup. Her best friend Claire Biggs helps without asking questions Shannon cannot answer. Claire is tall and blonde, sharp and loyal, sister to Johnny's teammate Hughie Biggs. She has known Shannon since primary school and stood by her through the worst bullying years. She is also tangled up with Gibsie in a long, prickly, will they or will they thing that gives the book most of its humor. Claire pretends Gibsie annoys her. Gibsie pretends he does not care. No one believes either of them.

School becomes Shannon's safest place, which says a lot. Tommen College is fee paying and strict, with uniforms and rules and rugby as a kind of religion. Teachers actually intervene. Johnny's protection helps, even from a distance. Shannon makes a small circle. Claire. Maybe a couple of kind classmates. Johnny's orbit, though she tries to stay out of it.

A friendship that will not stay friendly

Walsh takes her time with the middle. That is both the appeal and the test.

Johnny starts doing small, steady things. He checks that Shannon ate. He walks her partway without making it obvious. He leaves little gifts and notes when he cannot talk to her directly because of the no contact order. A carton of milk shows up when she needs it. He remembers what she said about a class. He asks about her day and actually listens. For a girl who learned not to expect kindness without a price, this is confusing.

Shannon responds in kind but slower. She learns his schedule. She watches his games from the edge of the crowd. She teases him when he is being dramatic, which he often is about food and rest. She demolishes him at Grand Theft Auto with cheat codes she has memorized, a scene I loved because he is so delighted and so bad at losing. She falls asleep on his couch against his side one evening and he just sits there, stroking her hair, afraid to move and wake her.

The rugby plot runs alongside. Tommen pushes toward the Schools Shield. Johnny plays through pain that is getting worse. He hides bleeding and swelling. He lies to the physio. Gibsie covers for him more than he should. Coach Mulcahy, I think that was his name, though I might be mixing surnames, senses something is off but Johnny keeps passing fitness tests on willpower. The final is tense. Johnny scores late to win it. The crowd rushes the pitch. A photographer pulls Shannon in beside Johnny for a photo, his hand clamped on her hip, both of them beaming. It runs in a national paper.

That photo blows up Shannon's home life. Her father sees it that evening, drunk on money meant for the family. He hits her with the rolled paper, pins her by the throat against the fridge, calls her vile names. Joey gets there in time to pull him off. Shannon sleeps in Joey's bed that night while Joey sits on the floor, promising he will take her with him when he finally gets out. It is one of several scenes where you realize the school calm is thin cover over something much worse.

There are softer beats too. Shannon turns sixteen and ends up at Johnny's house after Joey drives over to return a forgotten phone. She does not want to go in. The dogs mug her. Johnny cooks. They play games. She naps on him. Then Joey calls. Their mother had a miscarriage days earlier and their father is heading home. Shannon breaks down on Johnny's lap while he rocks her. Joey collects her. Johnny stands in the rain watching the car go, gutted.

The first kiss does not happen like in a film. Shannon showers at Johnny's after his mum diverts her there instead of taking her home, emerges in a towel to find Johnny fresh from his own shower, flashes him by accident, mortified. They end up on his bed with the old dog snoring between them. The tension that has built for hundreds of pages tips. She grabs his neck and kisses him. He freezes at first, then responds. It is clumsy and sweet and interrupted by reality, as everything with them is.

The changing room and the hospital

The changing room scene is the one people warn about, rightly. After a dominant Tommen win away from home, Shannon waits in the rain outside the visitors changing room for over an hour. Inside, Johnny is in trouble. An opponent's boot stud ripped open the old surgical wound. There is blood. A rushed stitch job. Gibsie tells Shannon to go in. She finds Johnny alone on a bench, shaking, stripped to boxers, trying not to cry.

She kneels to look at the wound on his thigh. She kisses the skin near it, meaning comfort. He grabs her hair and pulls her face up. This time he kisses her back properly, hungry and deep, pulling her onto his lap. Her skirt rides up. They are tangled when the coach walks in with medics. The school will have to be told. Shannon's father will hear a twisted version. You feel sick reading it because you know how it will be used against her.

Johnny goes in for emergency surgery. Doctors find a mess. A large adhesion on the sperm cord, an undiagnosed sports hernia, infection. He comes round on morphine and loses all filter. He tells his dad his equipment still works. He tells Shannon he loves her. He asks her to have his babies. He calls her his wife. The nurses laugh. Shannon cries and laughs. Gibsie records far too much of it.

While Johnny is in hospital, Shannon's home situation collapses. I will keep this brief because the book does. Her father attacks her badly. Tadhg, only eleven, throws himself over her, screaming. Ollie runs next door for help. Joey bursts in and beats their father to the floor. When it stops, their mother kneels beside her husband, not her bleeding daughter. That image stayed with me longer than any rugby scene.

Johnny, his dad, and some teammates get to the house after, or around the same time as help arrives. Accounts vary in retellings and I do not want to overstate the exact order. What matters is that adults finally see what Joey and Shannon lived with. Police are called. Shannon and Joey are taken out of the house. Shannon ends up in hospital, battered and dazed, with Johnny refusing to leave her side. He tells her how he feels. Then her father appears in the doorway, though he should be held elsewhere. The book cuts. You have to pick up Keeping 13.

The length problem and who it suits

At 624 pages in this edition, and longer in some ebook versions that run over 800 pages depending on formatting, Binding 13 is a commitment. You feel it around the two thirds mark. Training, school lunches, bus rides, missed calls, another party, another almost conversation. Walsh circles some beats. Shannon hides, Johnny pushes, Shannon pulls back, Johnny waits. Joey warns. Gibsie jokes. Claire bristles. Repeat with small shifts. I cared enough to keep going, but I checked how far I had left more than once.

The age gap and school setting will bother some readers, fairly. Johnny is seventeen, nearing eighteen, moving in adult rugby circles. Shannon is fifteen turning sixteen, small for her age, very sheltered. The book keeps their physical relationship limited and stresses consent and care, with Johnny often stopping things. Still, the power difference is real. He is popular and protected. She is isolated and young. If teacher student style dynamics or older teen with younger teen makes you uneasy even when handled gently, this will be a hard sell.

The handling of abuse is the bigger question. Walsh writes Shannon's fear well. The flinch when a door slams. The counting of steps. The way she apologizes for needing things. Joey's exhaustion feels true too, a kid parenting kids while trying to keep his hurling alive and his relationship with Aoife Molloy alive. Some scenes, especially the late attack and the hospital stretch, are intense. Later books in this series go darker, particularly Joey's books. Read warnings before you continue.

What kept me reading went beyond the central couple. Gibsie steals every scene he walks into, crude and loyal in a way that hides hurt. Claire is prickly but steadfast. Joey is the heart of the home chapters, furious and gentle in the same breath. Hughie, Aoife, Johnny's parents, even the dogs, they build a found family around Shannon that makes the Lynch house feel colder by contrast. When the Tommen boys close ranks around her, I felt relief in my chest.

I also appreciated that Walsh lets Johnny be weak. He cries. He needs help getting up stairs. He is terrified his body has betrayed him. He makes dumb choices about his health and pays for them. For a book sold as hot rugby star meets shy girl, there is a lot of ice packs, waiting rooms, and fear of being ordinary. That rang truer than the star talk.

If you like very long, slow burn school romances with dual points of view, Irish dialogue, sports detail, and a friend group you live with for weeks, this will likely work for you. If you want a standalone with a tidy end, or a quick romance under 350 pages, do not start here. This is half a story. It ends on a hospital doorway and a racing heart. I closed it annoyed and immediately looked for the next book, which is probably the point.

I am glad I read it, with reservations. I wish an editor had cut about a hundred pages of circling in the middle and pushed the hospital reckoning earlier. I wish a couple of the boy banter scenes had been trimmed, funny as Gibsie is. But I think about Shannon falling asleep on that couch, safe for an hour, and Joey sitting on the floor keeping watch, and Johnny Googling eye colors late at night like an idiot. Those small, soft moments carry the weight of the longer plot. I will keep going into Keeping 13 to see them get a full breath.