Golly, Sepetys knows how to do titles! Between Shades of Gray, Salt to the Sea, The Fountains of Silence.... Gorgeous.

The opening paragraphs were a wonderful hook: the blood being sold for the blood sausages, the physicality of the world under a dictatorship is powerfully realised, although for me not quite as powerfully as the horrors in Between Shades of Gray,

Sepetys' writing is powerful and the novel structured to effectively contrast the poverty and deprivations of the working class reality in Franco's Spain with the artificial luxury of the American tourists in the hotel. Connecting these two disparate worlds is Ana, a working class woman with a secret ("I know what you did last Summer") working at the hotel, and becoming friends with Daniel Matheson, the son of a Texan oil magnate who aspires to be a photo-journalist. Dark secrets are slowly revealed of a dark period in Spanish history.

For me, the number of point-of-view characters (Rafa, Julia, Ana, Puri., Daniel..) and the speed with which they change was perhaps a little choppy - and the pace a little slow especially at the start - the note Ana found and ate seemed a rather clumsy device. It was a moving novel which intertwines a range of plots, dramas and characters and I did care for them. And perhaps it is unfair to constantly compare it to Between Shades of Gray, but it for me somehow it didn't quite have the same power.