"Sincerity. It’s important. If you take photos with this type of sincerity you may as well be holding a gun. There’s a meaningful story here in Spain, a human story. But it’s virtually impossible to tell and even harder for an outsider to understand. You need to be smart about it. This is a dictatorship. Franco’s regime censors everything. Freedom of the press doesn’t exist here. And you better believe the censors read everything I write before I send it to New York. I’m too visible. But you…you can capture a real story here—a photo essay to show a different side of Spain than the one on the postcards. All the foreign correspondents are chasing the same threads—that Hitler survived and Franco smuggled him to South America; that Texaco secretly fueled Franco during the Spanish Civil War…Who cares if they’re true. That’s the wild boar everyone’s hunting so one day they’ll run it down. But they’re missing something. What about the people of Spain? What is life like under a dictatorship? What’s it like for young people when textbooks are government sponsored? What are their hopes and dreams when there are no free elections and only one religion?"
"They stand in line for blood." That's how this book opens, and you're instantly transported to Madrid, 1957. If you're an ignorant American like me, you probably know little to nothing about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, but Sepetys makes history come alive. I was quickly swept up in the story and spent half a day flying through the book. What I love about Sepetys is her penchant for underrepresented stories and her writing style. There's just something about the way she crafts a story that is captivating and evocative. It's easy to read her books. I'm always skeptical when there are alternating POVs in a story, and this is one of the few times I didn't hate it. I think the third person narrative certainly helped, but there's a section where each character gets a one page description of their confession and the parallels back-to-back just worked. There are times when the book gets a bit far-fetched like the two protagonists who just happen to be incredibly attractive, but overall this was an informative, enjoyable book which is what good historical fiction is all about.
"They stand in line for blood." That's how this book opens, and you're instantly transported to Madrid, 1957. If you're an ignorant American like me, you probably know little to nothing about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, but Sepetys makes history come alive. I was quickly swept up in the story and spent half a day flying through the book. What I love about Sepetys is her penchant for underrepresented stories and her writing style. There's just something about the way she crafts a story that is captivating and evocative. It's easy to read her books. I'm always skeptical when there are alternating POVs in a story, and this is one of the few times I didn't hate it. I think the third person narrative certainly helped, but there's a section where each character gets a one page description of their confession and the parallels back-to-back just worked. There are times when the book gets a bit far-fetched like the two protagonists who just happen to be incredibly attractive, but overall this was an informative, enjoyable book which is what good historical fiction is all about.