The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1) in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jan 22, 2011 Sarah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

The story underpinning this book is a good one: the mystery and tragedy of the life of Julian Carax, and the danger the young Daniel Sempere gets himself into whilst investigating said events. There are some great twists and turns, one of which in particular I would never have guessed and was a real shocker when revealed.

Unfortunately, much of the way in which the book was executed I did not enjoy. There was far too much exposition for my liking and it really dragged far too often. I found the p The story underpinning this book is a good one: the mystery and tragedy of the life of Julian Carax, and the danger the young Daniel Sempere gets himself into whilst investigating said events. There are some great twists and turns, one of which in particular I would never have guessed and was a real shocker when revealed.

Unfortunately, much of the way in which the book was executed I did not enjoy. There was far too much exposition for my liking and it really dragged far too often. I found the prose, dialogue and characters pretentious a lot of the time, which left me cold to their plights as I just didn't connect with them.

This book suffered from one of the same problems I bemoaned after finishing The Snowman - the author is from Barcelona and the book is set in Barcelona, both of which the reader is never allowed to forget. I in fact felt like I was constantly being beaten about the head with the fact that the book is set in Barcelona, which got annoying and boring really quickly. On rare occasion the location of events was actually important to the plot or mechanics of any given scene, but the most of the time the reader is barraged with street names, churches, plazas and other geographical minutia of Barcelona that do not matter one jot and only serve to clutter the prose and distract from what's actually important in the current scene.

I also found that the dialogue, thought processes and general demeanour of the main character hardly changed throughout the book, despite him being 11 when it starts and around 20 when the main action of the book finishes. He was just a young adult the whole way through, really, and I found it hard to keep track of the amount of time passing due to him seeming to be a young adult pretty much the whole way through.

I picked this up from a second hand book shop a few years ago and only just got round to reading it. In the intervening time I picked up a follow-on book by the same author, but I think I'll be giving them both away as I doubt I'd enjoy the other one any more than I did this. ...more

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Oct 09, 2016 Megan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: europe, international-reads, españa, translated-into-english, mysteries-thrillers-suspense, historical-fiction, fantasy, bookish-books-and-locales

While it took me longer to finish this book than anticipated, I savored every word of this category-defying novel. Beautifully written and translated, this novel is set in post-Spanish Civil War Barcelona, which is a moody, atmospheric character in and of itself. In extremely simplistic terms that do not do this novel justice, it follows a young man's quest to find the origins of a mysterious book titled "The Shadow of the Wind" that was written by an enigmatic author from Barcelona named Julián ...more

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