With every room service lobster, the price of which exceeds the salary of the waiter who delivers it, tourists are complicit in the deepening of the divide, and concealing from the outside world the atrocities being carried out by an authoritarian regime. All the glitter of the second comes at a cost. The former is brutal, the latter is a postcard: beautiful, yet irrevocably flat. “The Fountains of Silence” plunges readers into the two distinct worlds of Spain under Francisco Franco: a land in which fear is king, regulations abound, and human rights are nonexistent, alongside the fledgling, tourist-appropriate Spain, built for the wealthy visitors the country has recently decided to court. In a masterwork of historical fiction, Ruta Sepetys creates a literary pilgrimage to Spain in 1957, as she utilizes enigmatic characters and engaging plotlines to pull back the curtain on a portion of history that may be largely unknown to many.
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