It’s clear that Ana is that odious thing, a “sensual woman.” She attracts unwanted male attention and pays for rejecting it. Women’s ultimate purpose is “to be used as a mother” pleasure leads to ruin: “The sensual woman should not expect serious work, serious respect, clean feelings or welcoming tenderness.”

There are excerpts, too, from actual magazines and textbooks that promoted the fascists’ virulent misogyny. For readers wondering, “Did this all really happen?,” these documentary sources provide corroboration. Sepetys keeps her novel grounded in historical fact by including snippets of oral testimony from American officials describing the morally compromised but mutually beneficial relationship the United States established with Spain. “Estamos más guapas con la boca cerrada,” they tell each other: “We are prettier with our mouths shut.” But Ana’s independent spirit and her friendship with Daniel soon tempt her to take risks that threaten her family’s tenuous security. Twenty years after the civil war, these orphans still have secrets.

His snapshot of a nun carrying a dead baby in her arms becomes the first clue in a dark subplot about the stolen children of “degenerate” Republicans.Īt night, while Daniel and his family sleep in the palatial Hilton, Ana returns to the tiny, dilapidated apartment she shares with her siblings. Inspired by Robert Capa, he begins taking photographs that capture a reality the government would prefer to conceal. With him are his Spanish-born mother and his father, a Texas oilman eager to capitalize on Franco’s new openness to foreign investment.ĭaniel has brought his most treasured possession: a camera. There she meets Daniel, an appealingly down-to-earth boy spending a month in Spain after high school. By day, she is a chambermaid at the Castellana Hilton, a grand hotel catering to American tourists. That’s certainly true of Ana, the novel’s young heroine. Even in Madrid, ordinary Spaniards live in fear and poverty. It’s 1957, but Franco’s isolationist policies and a powerful Catholic Church ensure that Spanish women are treated like chattel, Spanish babies lack basic medical care and Republican sympathizers end their days laboring like slaves.

Spain under Francisco Franco is as dystopian a setting as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in Ruta Sepetys’s suspenseful, romantic and timely new work of historical fiction, THE FOUNTAINS OF SILENCE (Philomel, 512 pp., $18.99 ages 12 and up).

Ruta sepetys the fountains of silence