Marina - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I liked the story what I didn't like was the story inside the story. 
If I had to give my opinion concerning this book the phrase above would be more than enough to explain what I meant. 
"Marina" was the first book ever written by the famous Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon (the same author of "The Shadow of the Wind") though only recently has it become well known. 
His writing is spectacular but to be honest I think he overdid it when he enters his own world of fantasy and surrealism making everything be out of this world and coated with magic, creatures of the underworld and wild imagination. 
I guess it could be rated as an amazing book for many but personally speaking I do prefer something on more realistic and with a bit more down to earth. But despite so he still was able to give me quite a few scares and shivers down my spine and I read Oscar's and Marina's wild adventures. 
Another thing which I believe the author tries to pass on is the parallel of how Oscar was willing to go as far as the horrid creature he had seen only a short while ago to save the one he loved so much: Marina.
Many times human beings go as far as to do something absurd and wrong to save the ones they care and love. Like a mother hiding her child from the law despite them knowing they are guilty for a crime, parents not handing over their son or daughter to the police as a way of protecting them from suffering, husbands and wives having to lie to save face for one another, friends giving and loosing all they have as a way give that person they care so much for one last chance. And so was Oscar willing to do the same for Marina - become a monster - and turn her into one as well - so that she could continue living and being with him. 
So despite the unrealistic tone to this story it is still a beautiful and well written one. 

Book Review:

In May 1980, fifteen-year-old Oscar Drei suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts. It all began the previous autumn when, while exploring the dilapidated grounds of what seemed to be an abandoned house filled with portraits, he inadvertently stole a gold pocket watch. Thus begins Oscar's friendship with Marina and her father Herman Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to the gardens of the nearby cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the fourth Sunday of each month. At 10 a.m., a coach drives up to the cemetery and a woman with her face shrouded, wearing gloves, and holding a single rose is helped down from the coach and walks over to a nameless gravestone, where she sets down the flower, pauses for a moment, and then returns to the coach. The gravestone bears no marking but the outline of a strange-looking butterfly with open wings. On one of their subsequent walks Oscar and Marina spot the same woman and determine to follow her. Thereupon begins their journey into the woman's past, and that of the object of her devotion. It is a journey that takes them to the heights of a forgotten, postwar-Barcelona society, of now aged or departed aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and into the depths of the city's mysterious underground of labyrinthine sewers, corrupt policemen, beggars' hovels, and criminal depravity.