You searched for book_author:"Carlos Ruiz Zafón"
Is Andreas Corelli the Devil?
This is the part of the review where I confess I remember almost nothing about The Shadow of the Wind or The Prisoner of Heaven, because that’s how my memory rolls. So I can’t say much about the interconnected nature of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Instead, let’s look at The Angel’s Game on its own, as a suspenseful and literally literary thriller.
David Martín is…
I saw this on a library shelf and fell prey to their assertion that, having read The Shadow of the Wind, I should read this too. Blair’s review is spot-on when she says “the story begins promisingly” but then “the book soon begins to get quite silly and more and more plot holes and unanswered questions pop up”. The Prince of Mist suffers from being, ultimately, a story without a heart. Carlos Ruiz Zafón…
A good book works because it tells a good story about interesting people. Full stop. These two qualities, narrative and personality, intertwine to create a unique and worthwhile experience. If the story isn’t compelling or the people aren’t interesting, then all the tricks and gimmicks and set pieces are not going to elevate the book beyond mediocrity. That being said, I don’t think that the best books are always those with the most hyper-realistic characters.…
The description of The Shadow of the Wind reminds me of Foucault’s Pendulum, another literary-themed thriller in which the protagonists find that the events in a conspiracy-theory manuscript they acquire are coming true. When ten-year-old Daniel acquires a book, also called The Shadow of the Wind, he attracts the attention of all manner of mysterious people who want the book—or its author—including a disfigured man going by the name Lain Coubert, the name…