Marina

Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. Marina: A Gothic Tale. Little, Brown & Company. 2014. 326p. ISBN 978-0316044704. FIC ZAF on the library shelves.

Oscar is in 7th 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 Germán, 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 wrecking 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 mysteries will devour this book.