The Fountains of Silence by Ruta SepetysMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sepetys describes herself as a transition author, with books read by teens and adults. Her forte is the historical novel, choosing specific historical events that the world needs reminding about. And while it might seem like a dreary list of events (families torn apart by wars, sunken battle ships, stolen children), Sepetys writes with a heart ablaze with the light of hope. This shines through in every page, so the books are sad but never defeatist, the tone urgent with a broken and remade heart's plea to remember. These paeans to memory are simply written and fantastically paced, with brief sentences constructed for maximum impact. This is a writer for all, whose work deserves all the attention we can give them.
I jokingly sent a pic of me reading this book at a café to students discreetly inquiring where I was planning to eat in a nearby mall after our Drama Club's rehearsal (because no one wants to bump into their teacher on a weekend, haha). The book title could be a fitting caption for what teachers desire, too, at the end of a work week.
Jokes aside, the book's title refers to a darker time, when guardia civil roamed the land and tortured Spanish citizens who were deemed undesirable by the authoritarian General Franco.
When so many have been hurt, Spain underwent "El pacto del olvido," or the Pact of Forgetting. A state wide forgiving, an iron hand under a country's chin forcing it to look forward, turning its back on a traumatic past.
Spain isn't the only country with this kind of forgetting, submerging all underneath these fountains of silence, in the name of unity.
"There is a tension that exists between history and memory... Some of us are desperate to preserve and remember, while others are desperate to forget."
Sepetys' book is tense... but all musicians know that tension is necessary for a string to sing its true tune, for there can be no truth without this accompanying strain.
Two more Ruta Sepetys books to go. And years of eager waiting for her seventh and succeeding books yet to come.
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