Historical Fiction or Historical Fantasy, a great read
- Book: Zahara and the Lost Books of Light
- Location: Seattle, Spain
- Author: Joyce Yarrow
Although I knew that Jews and non-Christians had been expelled from Spain after living together for centuries, I knew little about what happened to them after they left Spain. In her novel, ZAHARA and the Lost Books of Light, Joyce Yarrow enlightened me in an imaginative saga that takes the reader on a careening trip through history, bouncing between the past and the present.
In 2015, Spain offered citizenship to descendants of Separdic Jews who’d been expelled from the country centuries before, and gave them three years to apply. Prior to that expulsion, Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived side by side in Spain, sharing their thirst for knowledge, compiling an enormous library of books written by worldly scholars. But the books, containing all that knowledge, were burned. Or were they?
Yarrow’s narrator, a young Separdic journalist who grew up in Seattle, Washington, where her grandparents fled following WWII, had experienced visions and ‘dreams’ about the past, about Spain, and about the terrors Jews suffered through the ages. She decided to apply for Spanish citizenship—not from the safety of the US, as was permitted, but by flying to Spain and reporting on the process. And while there, she planned on researching her family’s roots. This despite her grandmother’s warning that this could be a dangerous path. Once she finally arrives in Spain, she is warned that she should go back to the U.S., that she is not wanted in Spain, that some in Spain (far-right hate groups) disagreed with the governments offer of citizenship. But she wants to understand the dreams that had been coming to her since childhood. She will stay. From then on, it’s one close call after another. Lots of fascinating history, with a touch of magical realism thrown in.
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