MixedThe Los Angeles TimesClearly, Zafon is using the city as a vast amorphous symbol for the legacy of guilt, misery, unresolved conflict and social disruption left by the Civil War. Fumero, who switches sides handily more than once during the fighting — and ends up as a postwar fascist executioner in a grim hillside castle — is proof enough of that. The trouble is, Zafon is not a whole-hogging magical realist like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What he sets out to write — and manages to do so quite brilliantly — is a complex generational family mystery. But the thing about mysteries is that, to convince, they have to be bedded in acceptable fact. The compulsive fascination of Zafon's plot keeps bumping up against the implausibility of its context and background … Beautifully translated by Lucia Graves, it's a compulsive page turner: Never mind the improbabilities; the reader gets hooked by Daniel's strange odyssey and the innumerable offbeat characters he encounters along the way.
Daniel Mendelsohn
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksThere are many moments to cherish in this tangled and passionate investigation. The discussion of the Odyssey, if narrow in some respects, sparkles, and the seminar was lucky in its students ... best of all are the various small recognitions that combine to build the late-blossoming intimacy between Jay and his son. Of these the most intensely moving for me was the moment on the cruise at which Daniel, who suffers from intense claustrophobia, hysterically refuses to go into an Italian cave (allegedly that of the seductress Calypso). Jay takes him gently by the hand and not only walks him through what he most fears ('You did good, Dan') but afterward tactfully explains to other travelers that his son was helping him manage the steep stairs ... We should all be so lucky as to have had a father like that; and now we can enjoy his son’s honest, and loving, account of the improbable odyssey that gave them this one last deeply satisfying adventure together.
