The best readings are those of those unclassifiable authors who transit between genres in an effort to find stories worthy of being told under the umbrella of the most appropriate genre of the day. In the case of MarÃa Zaragoza Hidalgo, we find a versatile narrator capable of the story, the fantastic novel with a touch of terror, approaches to Black or historical fiction.
Training yourself in different narrative registers ends up serving the cause of the craft of writing without restrictions, a kind of commitment to the stories to be told as they strive to come out, beyond demands of any other type. And so we discovered in MarÃa a good handful of works that began to bear fruit in her early twenties. Until you get a AzorÃn Novel Prize 2022 which means that accolade in the creative and popular.
Ultimately, the point is to be able to enjoy surprising stories where the characters pivot around stripped-down plots, as if turned upside down in a quest to surprise and rethink typical scenarios. Inventive capacity made narrative virtue, added to a construction of psychological and human profiles with that solvency of someone who is in charge of giving life to characters that carry that weight and residue of the circumstances that go beyond the literary to accommodate themselves in a more transcendent vision. Every time what is narrated is adjusted to the need of the evolution of its protagonists.
Top 3 recommended novels by MarÃa Zaragoza
the library of fire
With a distant echo to the wonderful world of Ruiz Zafon, we travel from Barcelona to Madrid to recreate new fascinating universes around books...
In the effervescent Madrid of the thirties, Tina dreams of becoming a librarian. Along with her friend Veva de Ella, she will enter a world of cabarets and feminist clubs, cursed books and old ghosts. This is how they will discover the Invisible Library, an ancient secret society that watches over forbidden books.
Soon Madrid becomes a besieged city, where culture is in more danger than ever. In the midst of a war that devastates everything, Tina will live a clandestine love story that will mark the rest of her existence as she tries to protect the books not only from fires and bombs, but also from ignorance and looters. .
An exciting and essential novel about the love of culture. A sincere tribute to those who risked their lives to preserve the treasure of our libraries.
Sortilege
The fantasy genre is what it has, any assumption can become an interesting story. The main risk is digression or plot blunder, justified and/or supported by the fact that in the fantastic everything is possible.
A good pen dedicated to writing novels of this genre knows that, precisely because of this vast terrain open to creation, the story must always be sustained by verisimilitude (that the chain of events is linked naturally) and by the integrity of the story ( that there is something interesting to tell as the background of the fantastic trip).
This young author knows what to do and does very well in the field of fantasy at the service of literature. In this book Sortilege, MarÃa Zaragoza introduces us to Circe Darcal, a girl with a very particular gift that allows her to perceive reality in a much more complete and complex way. In her ordinary environment, this ability does not seem to be valued, but Circe already senses that her gift must have a specific weight, an application that still eludes her.
When the young woman goes to the city of Ochoa to study, the same city where her parents were murdered, Circe begins to fit pieces of her personal puzzle, from the emotional part to that kind of transcendental plan that concerns her through a gift that yes, it is showing itself with a weighty foundation.
And at that moment Circe will stop being an ordinary girl and become a precious piece on the board on which an atavistic struggle between good and evil takes place. With Circe still discovering herself, opening herself to her potential, events are falling on her. She will have to give her all to achieve that balance that turns her into a special being, capable of making a difference in the eternal dispute that moves parallel to our world.
avenue of light
On the other side of the visible spectrum things happen. Beyond our walls there are fourth dimensions that we can reach as soon as a spark causes access. The way back is capricious. And it may even happen that on our return nothing has been such a big deal. Because nobody usually believes the lucky travelers who return with their Cassandra syndrome to overcome... Only literature can then collect testimonies to form legends that, deep down, are as true as the unattainable future of the universe.
In 1955, Hermenegildo Pla disappeared without a trace while working on the Ciudad de la Luz, an architectural project in the subsoil of Barcelona that was to extend the old Avenida de la Luz and that was never inaugurated. Ten years later, Herme reappeared as if nothing had happened and in the same clothes in which he had gone to work that distant morning in 1955. When he explained where he had been, no one believed him.
Other recommended novels by MarÃa Zaragoza
Germans blow their heads off for love
the interesting Werther effect as an excuse to approach what remains today of that romanticism as existentialism in the last instance. Only that the paradigm of youth peering into the abyss of melancholy. Although today the matter changes and is loaded with many other aspects...
When Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther, the so-called Werther fever spreads through Germany, and almost two thousand readers end up committing suicide for love. Goethe would not stop wondering about his responsibility in these deaths, aware that every decision has consequences -often unpredictable-, and that the dilemma often boils down to dying or killing.
The protagonists of this novel will discover something similar: they live in different countries, but they meet in the Plaza, a virtual space of impossible architecture and changing buildings where any conflict is made and unmade. And they will try to play a game that allows them to meet again in the real world...
The Germans blow their heads off for love is a novel about a new form of existence -propitiated by the internet and social networks- where the sensation of impunity and fiction does not prevent us from returning, sooner or later, to reality, that space where they incubate and gestate the loves or the revolutions that will later shake our lives. But inevitably it is also a story about desire, disenchantment, the fighting spirit, abuse, dreams, love or masochism: that is, about everything that makes us human beings.
