I had high hopes of this book, having read the first couple of chapters and the reviews up till that point. I am familiar with the Camargue and the Alpujarras and hoped to re-visit in my mind's eye as I read the book. The descriptions basically turned out to read as though they had been lifted from a tourist guide book, so little true sense of the places.
I am interested in herbal remedies for both people and animals and that, definitely, for me, turned out to be the only interesting part of the book but not covered in any depth.
I am also very familiar with the history of the Spanish civil war and the repressions and fear of the Franco era but, again, if that is what you are interested in then there are much better sources, like Giles Tremlett's 'Ghosts of Spain'.
There were so many errors of fact and clearly ludicrous story lines that I lost patience, though I did stagger through to the end. One of the characters claimed to have seen beaver dams in Sussex in the 1930s. Beavers became extinct in England in the 12th century and have only just been reintroduced. Then there was the misinformation on Julian of Norwich. We are told that she was a nun who was walled up in the cathedral. There is no historical evidence that she was a nun ; she was an anchoress and her cell was attached to St Julian's church, which sits between King St and Rouen Rd in Norwich. There is a picture of her dressed as a Benedictine nun in Norwich cathedral but it is an incorrect attribution.
Then there are the ludicrous story lines and coincidences. We are expected to believe, for example, that a Spanish gypsy child, unable to read when first encountered, barely a month later is in school and reading, having also been passed off as the daughter of an English woman. I think not. So it drags on. There are small inserts of French, Roma and Spanish, presumably to add a little verisimilitude. The French passed muster, the Roma I don't know but there were several mistakes in the Spanish.
Oh and, as one of the other reviewers has mentioned ; why the americanisms in an English book by an English author?
I definitely won't be bothering to read anything else by this author.
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