We start the journey with Daniel when his father shares a secret place with him; a secret place that he has been forbidden to tell anyone about. “Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.” The Cemetery has a long tradition, that the first time a person visits, they must take a book with them and give it a home , where the book will never disappear and will have a life of its own. Daniel found The Shadow of the Wind. A book that immediately knew that this book was meant for him, he went home and read the entire book that same night. After he had finished the book he didn’t even want to sleep for fear of losing the books magic as if it had put a spell on Daniel. He had to know more about the unknown author, Julian Carax. This begins Daniel’s years of searching and learning more about Carax and his past.
I do not want to give too much away about this book, so I will tell you how I felt, leave you with some quotes and hope upon hope that this book will land in your lap and you will find it at intriguing as I did. This gothic novel had me enraptured from the very beginning. The promise of a secret, a secret called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books had me fascinated. I wanted to jump in and tag along with Daniel and his father to pick out my very own book to take home and keep safe. The parallel between the plots was uncanny and the subplots had subplots, yet it was easy to keep up. There was so much going on within these pages that I was lost in a fictional world never wanting to leave. The writing was exceptional and the story was a great escape.
As promised, here are some of my favorite quotes, enjoy!
“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
“Once in my Father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a place in our memory to which, sooner or later- no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget- we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
“There are worse prisons than words, Daniel.”
“Love is a lot like pork: there’s loin steak and there’s bologna.”
“I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me.”
“The art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
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