Review by Booklist Review
While wandering the streets of Barcelona, Oscar hears a haunting song and follows it to an ancient mansion overgrown with weeds. There he meets the entrancing, ethereal Marina and her painter father, who live a quiet, antiquated life in the ramshackle, candle-lit building. Soon Oscar spends almost all his free time with Marina, and when they follow a black-veiled woman home from a cemetery, they begin to uncover a series of increasingly disturbing clues about her, the unmarked grave she regularly visits, and the black butterfly symbol that seems to appear everywhere. It all leads to the unsettling history of one of Barcelona's industrial giants, Mijail Kolvenik, a prosthetics designer who gained renown in the aftermath of WWI and became obsessed with healing deformity and disease a fixation that led to his horrific fall from grace and left behind terrifying secrets. Originally published in Spain in 1999, this sweeping gothic mystery from Zafon (The Watcher in the Shadows, 2013) delivers gritty atmosphere, perilous action, propulsive storytelling, and ghastly body horror, all tempered by a bittersweet romance.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fifteen-year-old Oscar is leading a lonely life at his Barcelona boarding school in the late 1970s. While exploring an older part of the city, he meets Marina, a girl near his age who lives austerely with her father, who is a painter, in a rundown house. The teens get caught up in a mystery that began just after WWII. Inventors, aristocrats, opera singers, police inspectors, and millionaires were all involved in dark, sinister crimes, and the aftereffects of these events reverberate through the years and place Marina and Oscar in great danger. Ruiz Zafón tells his gothic tale with a great deal of exposition interspersed with sudden bursts of action. Weyman handles this expertly, narrating with great emotion, making the many minutes of description interesting to the listener when they could easily become tedious. He also plays around with a wide variety of accents: Spanish, Russian, German, and American characters are all subtly but distinctly portrayed, while narration is performed in dulcet English tones. Many characters are elderly and are given creaky voices that wobble in pitch, but it's never cartoonish. This is a sophisticated performance of an atmospheric, complex mystery. A Little, Brown hardcover. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Wandering near his boarding school in Barcelona, Oscar discovers a dilapidated mansion in which teenager Marina and her father live in a genteel time warp. Soon Oscar and Marina are roaming crumbling neighborhoods in the old city and stumble into a malevolent mystery that threatens their lives. Spanish novelist Zafon's (The Prisoner of Heaven) cinematic writing ensnares the listener in a supernatural snow globe of altered reality both hypnotic and beguiling. Daniel Weyman's narration is so vivid listeners may expect to see multiple readers listed in the credits. Originally labeled "young adult" when published in Spanish in 1999, Marina has crossed over to an intergenerational, international following. VERDICT If word of mouth fails to push this infective gem, readers' advisory is imperative since the cover illustration does not convey its gothic mysteriousness.-Judith Robinson, LIS, Univ. at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Set in Barcelona, Spain from late 1979 to May 1980, this gothic novel centers around 15-year-old boarding school student Oscar Drai. Instead of studying during his free time, the teen explores the city, and one day ends up in an area that seems deserted. Drawn in by music coming from an old dilapidated house, Oscar is given a scare by the owner, an eccentric and haunted German artist. Having accidently taken a watch from the house, the boy returns to bring the valuable item back and meets the enigmatic Marina. Realizing that they both like mysteries, Marina invites Oscar on an escapade to a graveyard to observe a woman who leaves a red rose on an unmarked grave. The two follow this woman, lose her, but eventually wander into an abandoned greenhouse filled with sinister marionettes and grotesque photos. Soon, the narrator becomes embroiled in the lives and histories of a presumed dead actress, recluse tycoon, and mad scientist obsessed with escaping death. From the very first page, this beautifully written work of historical fiction is impossible to put down. With elements of romance, mystery, and horror, none of them overwhelming the other, this complex volume that hints at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein manages to weave together three separate stories for a cohesive and eerie result.-Jesten Ray, Seattle Public Library, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
While exploring the rundown outskirts of late-1970s Barcelona, fifteen-year-old boarding school student Oscar Drai stumbles upon what appears to be an abandoned home and decides to investigate. But an unexpected encounter with its inhabitants sends him fleeing into the night with a pocket watch in his hand that doesn't belong to him. When he goes back the next day to return the watch, he discovers that the house belongs to Germn, an aging artist with a tragic past, and his frail daughter, Marina, with whom Oscar develops a close friendship. After witnessing a ghostly graveyard ritual, Oscar and Marina suddenly find themselves entangled in a series of events that had been set in motion at the turn of the twentieth century, involving an eccentric scientist and his quest to unravel the mystery of mortality through the reanimation of dead tissue, his doomed romance with a famous but damaged actress, and ultimately his descent into madness. Zafon weaves a twisted tapestry of gothic horror, quickly paced, with intricate layers of carefully crafted stories within stories; allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein abound. Whether describing the pointed arches and towering spires of postwar Spanish architecture, the gruesome visage of a resurrected corpse, or the intimate moments between a lonely boy and the best friend he's falling for, Zafon's writing moves gracefully from the macabre to the poignant and back again. shara l. hardeson (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Like Paris in Lerouxs The Phantom of the Opera, Ruiz Zafns Barcelona is a character in its own right, linchpin for this richly atmospheric, genuinely scary tale.Oscar Drai, 15, leads a solitary existence at his boarding school, marking time until he can escape to wander Barcelonas cold misty streets and decaying neighborhoods. While exploring the garden of a decaying mansion, he hears a beautiful voice singing and impulsively follows it indoors to its source, an old gramophone, next to which is a pocket watch. When the rooms furious occupant suddenly confronts him, Oscar flees back to school before realizing he still has the watch. Returning it, he meets Germn, its owner, and his beautiful daughter, Marina, who befriends him. Soon, Marina invites Oscar to accompany her to a lonely graveyard, where, hidden, they watch a veiled woman in black place a flower on a gravestone thats carved with the image of a black butterfly then disappear into one of the abandoned buildings nearby. Curious, they follow her and discover a greenhouse in an overgrown garden and make a horrific discovery. What lies behind the ancient facadesand in the fetid darkness beneath the city streetsis a mystery as layered as the citys history. Its well-known which road is paved with good intentionsnone are more lethal, Oscar learns, than love and pity.High-quality gothic genre fiction with a classic Mary Shelley sensibility. (Horror. 12 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
