This is one of my pending book review – I read it right after I finished the Cathedral of the Sea.

The Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
(Source: http://www.amazon.com)

Having read his The Shadow of the Wind and with the blurb suggesting that the story is set in Calcutta (India), I had doubly higher expectations from The Midnight Palace. Admittedly, it happens to be a YA (youth adult) novel. But maybe I shouldn’t have expected a sensible story in the first place.

The novel starts off well. Zafon displays the same dark, Gothic art of story-telling, which made The Shadow of the Wind such a pleasure to read. Zafon seems to be fascinated by fire – it plays symbolically a very important role in The Shadow of the Wind as well as in The Midnight Palace. Kind of wondering if that would be a common thread/style seen in all his books.

However, after the first 25-30 odd pages the story starts unravelling. It just gets bizarre with many of those w-t-f moments. And it doesn’t take long to figure out what the end could be like. All in all, the book is a big disappointment. So, while the story is a flop, the narrative style still rescues the book slightly and gets me to give it a 2-star rating on Goodreads