The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1) in 2017 Reading Challenge

May 10, 2016 Mikan rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned-the-ebook

A slow built. Lots of dragging and roundabout at the beginning I was afraid the author had lost his focus while writing. Beautiful language, he's managed to show what beauty, fear, and terrors are without writing the actual words. Gives me a lot to learn as an amateur writer.

However, there were times where I feel like the frilly words had reduced the criticality of the moment. Though perhaps it's Zafón's intention, to show the impact of a character's trait to his surrounding. Indeed, the charac A slow built. Lots of dragging and roundabout at the beginning I was afraid the author had lost his focus while writing. Beautiful language, he's managed to show what beauty, fear, and terrors are without writing the actual words. Gives me a lot to learn as an amateur writer.

However, there were times where I feel like the frilly words had reduced the criticality of the moment. Though perhaps it's Zafón's intention, to show the impact of a character's trait to his surrounding. Indeed, the characters are strong, they have their own voices and identity as far as using different vocabularies for different characters, it doesn't feel as if it's written by one person.

Many times I'm unsure on what genre this novel is. The writing is too calm and too beautiful for a mystery genre, I keep having this hunch that I can never be too relaxed. And I was right. Surprises and twists were waiting at every other turns at unexpected times. The plot isn't as grandiose, but the way Zafón scattered important points is enough of a surprise factor to keep things interesting.

The last few pages were full chocked of stuff, and I realized that the plot points scattered about at the beginning were indeed the writer's Chekov's Guns. It feels a bit too 'info dump', though, how the questions were resolved on, like, the last 60 pages or so through a character's super long letter. A reviewer below talked about how this character could write some points that she wasn't supposed to know since she wasn't at the scene, but she still wrote it anyway in such minute details as if she was there. I have to agree. This infodump style kinda bugs me.

Still, this is a great book. Sad, sad stories. Prepare your heart since almost all characters had their own tragedy. 4/5 stars. Page turner level 'shit I can't stop but hang on I'm too scared to read the next page'. Not an 'AAAAA THERE'S A MONSTER!!' scared, but more like 'fuckfuckfuck what's gonna happen to A please don't make A more miserable than this' scared. After-read existential crisis level '............. Well fuck. Now what am I supposed to do—OH RIGHT THERE'RE TWO MORE VOLUMES OF THIS SERIES'.

Yep. I'm picking up The Angel's Game. ...more

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Feb 21, 2014 Natalie [genreneutralreader] rated it it was amazing

This was a truly unique experience for me. Often, if it takes me long to read a book, it's because I can't engage with the story. Quite opposite with The Shadow of the Wind. I would find myself so mesmerized by the gorgeous imagery or the lyrical and poetic prose that I would just stop reading after a particularly memorable line or paragraph and just imagine what the scene on the page would look like in reality. This book was a fairly contemporary novel that FELT like a classic piece of literatu ...more

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Mar 23, 2017 Felicity rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Love at first sight!
Zafon's writing is just beautiful. His prose is lyrical without being heavy. I like how he mixed genres : mystery with magical realism. But his novel is also clearly influenced by gothic literature which I really enjoyed.
The character are quite believable and you root for them. I loved Daniel and also loved Carax through the stories about his past. Fermi was also enjoyable and funny although some of his jokes irritated me.
I saw the big reveal coming but I was very happy to ...more

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Sep 19, 2015 Jade Lauron rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: everyday-fiction

I found this book hard to get into, REALLY hard. I'm not much of one for mysteries, but I generally like gothic novels, so maybe it was just the convoluted nature of the novel that put me off. Still, I slogged through this novel like it was a homework assignment, and was rewarded with an ending I didn't see coming, which was rather nice. I actually enjoyed the long exposition where all the pieces were tied together in the end chapters more than I had all the previous book, and you couldn't have ...more

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