Voice of Youth Advocates

Oscar is in seventh grade and has been attending a resident Catholic school in Barcelona for years. On one of his meandering walks, he discovers a dilapidated home and feels compelled to enter. He finds an elderly man sleeping by the fire and accidentally steals a watch when the man wakes. When he returns to drop off the watch, he encounters Marina and Germßn, her father. She shows him a cemetery where, every month, a figure clad in black comes to worship at an unmarked grave. They begin investigating, but soon become confronted by horrors beyond their imagination. As they dig further into the secrets of people who died more than thirty years ago, they uncover a sinister and horrific plot with a villain bent on wreaking vengeance on all who wronged him. Will Oscar and Marina be added to his list?In a tale reminiscent of Frankenstein, Zafon weaves suspense from a string of small events that build towards a confrontation between the teens and the tale's villain. The characters are all well-rounded and contribute to the narrative, and Oscar's relationship with Marina is an accurate portrayal of early teen relations. The setting of Barcelona at the beginning of the 1980s, a few years after the end of the Franco dictatorship, adds an element of mystery and the city is almost its own character. Fans of Neil Gaiman will devour this book, and it deserves a place next to popular mysteries.Etienne Vallee.Marina is a wonderfully written thriller with a macabre twist. Any high school student will fall in love with Marina, as well as the hidden history of Barcelona threaded into the tale. The characters leave a long-lasting impression that ensnares readers in a gothic adventure. Once readers pick up this novel, they will not be able to put it down. 5Q, 5P.Chelsea Stockdale, Teen Reviewer.

School Library Journal Starred Review (Thu May 01 00:00:00 CDT 2014)

Gr 8 Up-Set in Barcelona, Spain from late 1979 to May 1980, this gothic novel centers around 15-year-old boarding school student Oscar Drai. Instead of studying during his free time, the teen explores the city, and one day ends up in an area that seems deserted. Drawn in by music coming from an old dilapidated house, Oscar is given a scare by the owner, an eccentric and haunted German artist. Having accidently taken a watch from the house, the boy returns to bring the valuable item back and meets the enigmatic Marina. Realizing that they both like mysteries, Marina invites Oscar on an escapade to a graveyard to observe a woman who leaves a red rose on an unmarked grave. The two follow this woman, lose her, but eventually wander into an abandoned greenhouse filled with sinister marionettes and grotesque photos. Soon, the narrator becomes embroiled in the lives and histories of a presumed dead actress, recluse tycoon, and mad scientist obsessed with escaping death. From the very first page, this beautifully written work of historical fiction is impossible to put down. With elements of romance, mystery, and horror, none of them overwhelming the other, this complex volume that hints at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein manages to weave together three separate stories for a cohesive and eerie result.— Jesten Ray, Seattle Public Library, WA

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

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.

ALA Booklist (Thu May 01 00:00:00 CDT 2014)

While wandering the streets of Barcelona, Oscar hears a haunting song and follows it to an ancient mansion overgrown with weeds. There he meets the entrancing, ethereal Marina and her painter father, who live a quiet, antiquated life in the ramshackle, candle-lit building. Soon Oscar spends almost all his free time with Marina, and when they follow a black-veiled woman home from a cemetery, they begin to uncover a series of increasingly disturbing clues about her, the unmarked grave she regularly visits, and the black butterfly symbol that seems to appear everywhere. It all leads to the unsettling history of one of Barcelona's industrial giants, Mijail Kolvenik, a prosthetics designer who gained renown in the aftermath of WWI and became obsessed with healing deformity and disease fixation that led to his horrific fall from grace and left behind terrifying secrets. Originally published in Spain in 1999, this sweeping gothic mystery from Zafón (The Watcher in the Shadows, 2013) delivers gritty atmosphere, perilous action, propulsive storytelling, and ghastly body horror, all tempered by a bittersweet romance.