A review by mareich
The Snow Gypsy by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

5.0

This is not the type of book I normally read, let alone enjoy, but this one blew my socks off. It's a captivating tale, mostly in immediate post-World War II Spain, in which a young English woman, studying herbal treatment of animals from English gypsies sets out to find out if her brother survived his time fighting against Franco in the late 1930s. She leaves England, spending time at a gypsy festival in southern France to learn what she can about the territory in southern Spain where she last knew her brother was. She meets a young Spanish flamenco dancer who has a young daughter but no husband, and travels with them to Granada, near the mountains where her brother vanished. Along the way, Rose learns about the horrors of war, the hidden secrets of the Spanish Civil War, and how even tiny mountain villages were affected by those horrors. I won't give away details, but the character development and attention to detail in this novel is stunning and breath-taking. My normal recreational reading are murder mysteries, science fiction, and some fantasy, and this book doesn't fit any of those genres. I could hardly put it down and will look for other books by Ashford.