The Shadow of the Wind

Shadow of the Wind ****
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Book Type: Fiction, Drama, Mystery
Summary:Barcelona, 1945—Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. 
Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.
Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

summary found on goodreads
My Review: Russ and I went to Borders going out of business sale several times in hopes that we would find some good books for super cheap. I could NOT find any books I knew were good so I started randomly grabbing books off the shelf and reading the back cover, I figured eventually I might actually find something I'd be interested in. When I picked up this book and read the back cover I thought "FINALLY, something that sounds interesting. I read the first page and decided that this would be a fun book to read. So I bought it. For 4 bucks or something. And I have to say, I was not disappointed! This book is full of danger and intrigue. You follow a young boy named Daniel who picks up a book in the "cemetery of forgotten books". He LOVES his book so he wants to read more. When he tries to find more books by the same author, Julian Carax, he discovers that there are no more. In fact every copy of this authors work has been burned by the same man; a man who goes by the name of the devil described in the book that Daniel so loves. Daniel begins a journey to discover why these books are being systematically burned, who is behind the burnings, and what happened to the author himself. The book is constantly going back and forth between Daniel's story and the stories that he is retrieving from those who knew Julian Carax. This book is riddled with beautiful and terrifying characters, love, danger, intrigue, murder, lies, and deceit. It is a great mystery that is well worth the time it takes to read. 

**for the sensitive reader: There is some sex and language in this book.