Review by ofthelane - The Shadow of the Wind

ofthelane 's review for:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

5.0

adventurous dark funny mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This book is long... and it took me forever to read. I have had this book since 2019 and I had just lost motivation to read it, as it dragged in some points. The book was also just genuinely long (or long to my standard as I never read books more then 450 pages). It is also one of those books with small words and small margins. However once I got back into it I could not put it down. All I can say is, oh my goodness this book is spellbinding. It is so beautifully written, that I found myself rereading a lot of paragraphs, just admiring the sentence structure. The long story was worth it though, as everything comes together to create a satisfying ending for the story. Every character in the novel gets an in-depth back story, which deepened my understanding of each characters personalities. So much detail is put into every line, which makes it such a gorgeous read.

Also, every character is connected. All of them.

Some issues I had personally were that since the story takes place in Spain, street names and locations are mentioned rather often and as a native English speaker I had one hell of a time trying to pronounce them. Some phrases were also left in Spanish and certain references were made that I just didn't understand. Maybe I should brush up on some Spanish history. Halfway through I did end up switching to an audiobook to pick up the pace of my reading (I am a rather slow reader) and was heavily embarrassed at how I had butchered names and places pronunciation.

I plan to read the rest of the books in the series as well, but I highly recommend this book it is just amazing!

Content Warnings