El palacio de la medianoche

My rating:               

While at a bookstore here in Barcelona, I found several more books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the author of Marina. After debating a bit I decided to buy El palacio de la medianoche, another of his young adult books. Like Marina, this novel also has a somewhat fantastical or supernatural theme and I really enjoyed reading it.

The story focuses on twins who were separated at birth, the sister, Sheere, growing up with her grandmother and the brother, Ben, in an orphanage. They were separated to try to avoid a man who had killed their father and mother and was out to kill them too. Also similarly to Marina, the man, Jawahal, had made himself into a monster while pursuing his work. When Ben and Sheere are finally reunited they, along with Ben's group of friends from the orphanage, work to find out everything they can about the man who is trying to kill them and how they can stop him. While the book does have the same kind of supernatural setting as Marina, I feel like El palacio de la medianoche is more plot-driven. Marina definitely had some intense scenes with plenty of action, but there was also a heavy emphasis on the characters and the general mystery of the situation. This book, on the other hand, still has the mystery but moves forward at a faster pace with lots of action throughout.

Now that I've read two books by Zafón, I really look forward to reading more since what I've read has been great so far. I'm thinking next I might look for La sombra del viento since I have various friends who have recommended it. 

El enredo de la bolsa y la vida - by Eduardo Mendoza

My rating:   

The second novel I read for my upcoming Spanish class was El enredo de la bolsa y la vida, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much as Marina... Or at all really... And reading it in while still in France may have made me dread my upcoming trip to Barcelona...

This book, by Eduardo Mendoza, is narrated by an anonymous amateur detective investigating his friend's disappearance. The narrator is a former criminal / mental patient who now 'works' as a hairdresser (who has no clients). He learns about the disappearance of his friend Rómulo el Guapo, who was also a criminal / mental patient, from Quesito, a teenage girl who knew Rómulo because he spent time with her mother. The plot involved the detective searching for his friend with a host of various other bizarre characters while supporting himself by borrowing money from the friendly Chinese family with a shop across the street from his hair salon. In my opinion the book was pretty boring (I fell asleep every time I read it, no matter what time of day it was) and by the end became pretty ridiculous. 

This was the last book I had to read before arriving in Barcelona, and I was really put off by the long and frequent descriptions of how miserable Barcelona is in the summer and how, because of the heat, the narrator spends most of his working day laying in the hair salon naked covered in sweat and flies. Luckily the heat is just starting to get bad here in Spain and I will be heading back to the US on Monday, missing the worst of the Barcelona summer. 

Marina

My rating:                   

Marina is the first book I read this summer, and I actually read it for one of my classes. I'm spending this summer studying abroad, first for a month in France and then a month in Spain (which is where I still am now). For my classes in Spain we have a lot of reading beforehand, which might have been great for the people enjoying their summer vacation but I'm already in France doing my work for those classes and I really wasn't looking forward to reading several novels for my Spanish class at the same time. Fortunately, Marina ended up being an amazing book!

The author, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, is fairly well known for his book La sombra del viento, which I haven't read but plan to at some point. Marina, unlike La sombra del viento, is a young adult novel so it was a pretty easy read. The book focuses on the adventures of Oscar Drai and his friend Marina, two teens in Barcelona. At first Marina is hesitant to spend time with Oscar, but the two end up spending more and more time together, after following a mysterious woman in black from the cemetery. Oscar and Marina end up involved in a mystery that most people had forgotten about years before they born. The mystery centers around Mijail Kolvenik, a foreigner who came to Barcelona and began working making prosthetics. The company he worked for became hugely successful, Kolvenik became rich and married a beautiful woman, but as it turns out he was more or less a mad scientist. Mijail was obsessed with finding a way to cure diseases and avoid death, and he was willing to carry out some pretty extreme experiments hoping to find the results he wanted. Skipping forward to the future with Oscar and Marina, it turns out Kolvenik is still alive but has more or less turned into a monster after experimenting on himself. Along with several people from Kolvenik's past, the two teens try to find out everything they can about the crazy doctor and how they can stop him. 

When I got ready to read Marina for my class, the last thing I expected was a supernatural book aimed towards the young adult audience. Since I read a lot of books like that anyways, I was definitely excited once I started reading. I really like that while Marina still fits into the supernatural genre that seems to be so popular right now, Zafón wrote a very unique book that, at least for me, wasn't too predictable.