...for those beach days...or four a.m. obsessed readers
THE SHADOW IN THE WIND
(Org: La sombra del viento)
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
So roughly freshman year the guy lent me this book because he thought I might like it. I left it on my dorm desk for about half a month while schoolwork and the likes got the better of me. It took a while to open it up, but when I did, I was suckered in to the mystery of it all. I found myself up at three or four a.m. reading it, needing to know the answers, and finally being amazed by the twists and turns. It's obviously not a literary kind of book, but it's what my friend calls, intelligent commercial fiction. You'll be left with a book hangover by the end of it, I swear.
It takes place in Barcelona, Spain during the Franco regime, and it follows the life of Daniel Sempere after he gets a book from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books called The Shadow of the Wind by a mysterious Julian Carax. His obsession with the book and its seemingly nonexistent author is what leads him down a spiral of mystery and danger. My favorite part is that his life during this mirrors Julian's. And, best of all, it's a coming-of-age tale, and you can see it interspersed through the mystery.
Seriously, one of my favorite books. The TWIST is crazy, and the writing, even for a translation, is sublime. I'm currently making my way through the original version.
