El príncipe de la niebla by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I don’t know how common it is for non-English authors to locate their stories in England at first, I assumed the setting was the Spanish coast of the English Channel but it seems to have been set on the southeast coast of England but – to be honest – he never explicitly states the location (there are references to workers coming from London). His descriptions of scenes and thoughts are very good but limited because of the brevity of the story. I enjoyed the story, even though I don’t generally read horror stories, because Zafon develops characters well with minimal words and reveals nuanced relationships between the characters.

(I’ve recently started reading books written in Spanish to avoid translation issues.) I’m not going to review this as a children’s book, but as a general-purpose novel, which was suggested by the author himself in the foreward. The author is a well-known Spanish writer, so this gave me an opportunity to see how different he writes from the Latin American translations of English books I’ve read before. It’s intended audience is probably junior high but it was challenging for me. This is a short book which would probably be more correctly called a novella. I’ve learned that each book has a unique vocabulary, with certain words used repeatedly by individual authors. I’m surveying a range of genres and authors to expand my vocabulary. The English translation of the title is, “The Prince of the Fog.” I read this book as part of my Spanish lessons.

El príncipe de la niebla by Carlos Ruiz Zafón