Marina

Starred review from May 12, 2014
In a novel first published in Spain in 1999, Zafón (The Midnight Palace) transports readers to 1979 Barcelona, where 15-year-old Oscar Drai lives a dreary boarding school life. That’s until he meets a girl named Marina, who takes him to an old cemetery where a cloaked woman conducts an odd ritual over a nameless grave. Soon they uncover a twisted tale of hereditary disease, murder, and horrible experiments, all of which took place years ago and whose central figures are dead. Or are they? Zafón is a master of both the subtle simile (“A strange sound throbbed in the darkness. A metallic murmur, like the sound of a venetian blind quivering”) and the outrageous image: “The light filtering down from above revealed the face of a harlequin. Two diamond shapes covered its glassy eyes, and steel fangs protruded from its lips of polished wood.” On a rational level, the tale, like many Gothic thrillers, is preposterous, but readers are never given time to think rationally.
Unlikely discoveries in mysterious, half-
ruined mansions alternate with spine-
tingling action sequences to create a
grotesquerie that will delight horror fans. Ages 12–up.

Starred review from September 29, 2014
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.