The Fountains of Silence

Book Title: The Fountains of Silence

Author: Ruta Sepetys

Date Started: August 23rd 2019

Date Completed: August 26th 2019

Genres: Historical, Romance, Mystery

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Stars

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Since I read Salt to the Sea three years ago I've been dying to pick up another one of Sepetys' books. The Fountains of Silence dives into a very different era in a very different place with very different people but is no less thorough and engaging. And hey, you gotta love a cute romance.

Sepetys is very good at representing history without feeling like you're in a lecture. She cares about her story, and so enriches it with the context, furled by the extensive research she's done - rather than distracting you with unnecessary tangents for the sake of it. The one blip for me were the contextual quotes; they were fascinating and helpful for my understanding of what was happening, but they took me out of the story with how irregularly they were placed throughout the book. It was a big sign pointing at the important plot twists that I would've preferred to have felt out myself. But at the same time, those quotes really hit their mark.

The protagonist of Fountains of Silence is a photographer, something which I didn't think much of until I started reading. For one thing, the way Sepetys writes about photographs without actually showing them is so engaging. But it's also a very clever device to put in a story about Francoist Spain, and she takes full advantage of that. (Ironically, the egalley I have doesn't include the photos at the back of the book that I imagine are either supposed to be Daniel's or are what inspired them. It'd be so interesting to cross-reference them with what's mentioned in the story.)

The Fountains of Silence has a time jump in it that I wasn't convinced about to begin with but actually, having finished, it really works well. I think it could've been more towards the middle of the book because I really wanted it to go on a little longer. I can see why it didn't or we would've had an entirely new story inside the same book, but things ended very abruptly. I finished the last page and was confused that the author's note was suddenly there.

Once again Ruta Sepetys is proven to be the queen of young adult historical fiction both in her diligence of research and mastery of stories inside that. The Fountains of Silence is a reasonably easy read for one so dark in many ways, and definitely an enjoyable way to educate yourself about important topics.