Nice story but fairly predictable and a little too "all-sewn-up." Main characters a little flat and slightly underdeveloped but the author has serious potential in this department and does human interaction well.

While jarring and sad at times, this book is beautifully written. There is one relationship in the book that seems to weigh the book down and I think it would have faired better without it.

It was very difficult to get into this book. Even with a historical frame of reference, speaking Spanish and basic Catalan, and having lived in Barcelona for 18 months and traveled much of the rest of Spain...this book was still difficult to stick with. After about page 300 it gets really interesting and the author does a nice job of telling a good story while maintaining fidelity to the history. Decent historical-fiction.

At first, it seemed like the book had potential -- in the end it didn't live up to it. I think our Book Club best summed it up something like; Really good books that stand on their own have us answer real questions about the substance of life, about things that are important. Books that are only, eh, always leave us talking about how this/that did or didn't make us feel.