Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Book Review: "The Midnight Palace"

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's latest novel to be published in the US is The Midnight Palace (forthcoming from Little, Brown), now translated by Lucia Graves. Another dark, somewhat-supernatural story from Zafón, this one set in 1930s Calcutta and starring a group of young children out to solve a mystery and quiet a restless spirit before it does them harm.

While I would have liked some further character development, the texture and style of Zafón's writing makes it compulsively readable, and the tension he's able to build up through the telling certainly kept me turning the pages. He's very good at bringing cities and buildings to live, a skill which is certainly on display in The Midnight Palace.