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I’m just so sad that Carlos Ruiz Zafon died young (in his 50s), of cancer. He was a masterful writer, and his The Shadow of the Wind and the whole Cemetery of Forgotten Books series are among my favorite books ever. And now there will be no more coming.
With it being October and Halloween season, I thought it would be nice to pick up one of his young adult books that I hadn’t read yet, Marina. (I read The Midnight Palace, another earlier work for young adults, and thought it was good but wasn’t up to the level of masterwork yet.)
Marina is his last YA book, and it does show he’s gearing up to write the Cemetery books. It’s set in Barcelona, and just having him mention many of the same places that are in my favorite stories was satisfying. This book is set mostly in 1979, with some flashbacks to three or four decades before.
Oscar Drai is a 15-year-old student at a boarding school, and he doesn’t much enjoy the rhythms of his student life. But he does manage to sneak away in the evenings and weekends to explore the city of Barcelona. He particularly enjoys the old parts of the city, where largely abandoned hundred-year-old mansions are a reminder of past glory days.
On one of his walks, he meets Marina, a teen who lives with her father in one of these houses. She introduces him to a mystery: a woman shrouded entirely in black who like clockwork visits a grave in a forgotten little cemetery and leaves a red rose. The grave features no name, just the symbol of a black butterfly.
They decide to investigate the mystery behind this woman and the person in the grave and end up descending into a dark tale featuring horrors from decades before.
Marina is part gothic horror story, part poignant tale of friendship. It was a bit more gruesome than I expected (in part perhaps because it was young adult, in part because the Cemetery books are gothic but not horror). But it was quite a good novel to read in the Halloween season. And it gave me one last taste of the unmatched Zafón.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes 10 uses of mild language and 5 instances of the name of Deity in vain. The book has some gory, intense sections featuring a man who is creating undead creatures, a bit Frankenstein-like. Mentions of blood, severed body parts, attacks and fights involving guns, knives, etc. There are brief references to a character’s thoughts of suicide. There is an oblique reference to sexual assaults.
