A Big 4+ review of The Spanish Girl by Jules Hayes

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From the publisher: Feisty journalist Isabella has never known the truth about her family. Escaping from a dangerous assignment in the turbulent Basque country, she finds her world turned upside down, firstly by her irresistible attraction to the mysterious Rafael, and then by a new clue to her own past. As she begins to unravel the tangled story of her identity, Isabella uncovers a story of passion, betrayal and loss that reaches back to the dark days of Spain’s civil war—when a passionate Spanish girl risked everything for her country, and for the young British rebel who captured her heart. 

The first thing that comes to mind for me when the Spanish Civil War is mentioned is Pan’s Labyrinth. [1] Yes, it’s a fable, and, yes, it actually takes place after Franco won, but the protagonist’s stepfather so vividly portrayed the brutality under a veneer of sophistication, and the story’s so rife with the undercurrents of the recent conflict, that images from the movie invariably conflate with whatever else I read on the subject. So it’s not surprising that the odious stepfather was cast as the various villains in my mental production of The Spanish Girl by Jules Hayes.

I’m generally a fan of dual or multiple timelines, and this novel has one set in 1976 and one in 1937. I ultimately liked having both periods, but at about a third of the way through, I wasn’t sure why the later one was bothered with. I’m not sure if it would have been aided by cutting between the two sooner or more frequently; I just know that I didn’t particularly care if we got back to the one in 1976 after the 1937 Spanish Civil War scenes started.

Was I like the majority of Spain, insofar as I’d been remiss in not investigating what had really happened, even regarding my own parentage, about my own mother and father?

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

Part of that was because I had a hard time buying the instalove Isabella has for Rafael, perhaps because most of his alleged attractiveness is mediated by Isabella telling us about the attraction rather than making him charming and seductive through his actions. For example, he persists in calling her “querida,” a term of endearment, having only met her a scant time before and despite her request that he stop it, making me find him less than attractive. And in the beginning, that romance and a lot of re-iteration of how much Isabella wanted to know about her mom seemed to be the only justification for the framing of it. And, I suppose, the ability to weigh in on the consequences of the Franco regime, particularly during, but also after the war.

As rapidly as the suspicion had descended, it dissolved, and something shifted within me as this man I did not know spoke of a woman he did not know with such empathy.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

So if you start the book and have that feeling, don’t give up on it after you find out the story about the Spanish Civil War; there is, eventually, some payoff for the inclusion of Isabella in the story. I still find the first timeline more compelling, but it didn’t bother me when I found out where it was going. I think, though, I would have preferred to read a more developed version of Sofia’s story than both of them.

Despite the heavy cloud cover the morning light was growing brighter but the quietness, which hung like a physical entity around Miguel’s abode, hit me as hard as the rumble of noise when I opened the balcony doors of my Barcelona flat.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

Alternatively, I would have liked more info about the “other victims” that are vaguely referenced in the story. The White Terror killed somewhere between 160,000-200,000 and no one knows how many victims of rape, torture, and oppression. Like most countries recovering from fascist regimes, the new government is ready to move on rather than deal with the legacy of those insidious political ideologies, and Hayes does a good job of bringing that reluctance (at best) and whitewashing (more frequently) into the limelight. But the magnitude of the tragedy is harder to discern, although it’s clear that Hayes has done the research and is aware of it.

With Franco dead, the new Spanish government does not want Spain’s civil war in the global eye. They want trade, they want tourists. The don’t want the remains fo a murdered woman and her unborn child in the world media.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

The plot, however, is quite good, and although I suspected most of the eventual outcome of events, I was not ever completely sure I was correct until the author revealed those plot points. One of the distractions (I’m not sure that it was meant to be a red herring) was that the “young British rebel” referred to in the publisher’s synopsis is named Jack Hayes, which you probably already realize shares a last name with the author (although I now believe it’s a pseudonym). So I kept wondering if this was a family history that Hayes the author was fictionalizing, and wondering when that was going to become obvious. It seems a petty complaint, but it took me out of the flow of the story, and I wish that the author had chosen a different name for the character.

As well as being patient, George was also kind and generous to his men. Something else a family’d knock out of him.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

As long as I’m bringing up petty complaints, I really dislike the way the book is captioned on Amazon (US, UK, Canada, and Australia): “The Spanish Girl: A completely gripping and heartbreaking historical novel.” It’s like someone getting ready to tell you a story at work and starting it with “This is soooo funny.” It almost never is. Let me decide if it’s completely gripping and heartbreaking, and don’t tell me that in the title. If I’d come across the book that way, I’d have done a hard pass.

Barcelona caught Jack’s imagination and captured his heart—because the city itself had a heart. Beating and pulsing. It was a feeling he wanted to scoop up and put in a box.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

This book does deal with some serious trauma, and there are moments that are sad, although I didn’t find them as heartbreaking as whoever wrote the header. I never got completely vested in the characters, and I’m not completely sure why. However, my favorite character was Jack Hayes, and it’s because my view of him was based on his actions and attitudes, not because a narrator told me how great he was, that I rather suspect my lack of connectedness with most of the characters was for the same reason I wasn’t enamored with Rafael.

I objected a little to the characterization of the villainous Severino Herrera; the word “instability”is most frequently used, and sometimes “madness.” These descriptions come up regularly before Herrera actually appeared, and I expected someone with wild mood swings or a tenuous grip on reality. Instead, we have a remorseless sadist who hungered for power. Although this can be a pathological psychiatric state, it’s not really unstable—he seems to be consistently nasty, and the frequent references to Isabella’s godfather as an effective protector would seem to indicate that Herrera is quite capable of reining in his instincts in a rational manner. If I were to characterize anyone as unstable, it would be Joe Hayes, Jack’s duplicitous brother.

He thought he could cry forever. But of course we don’t cry forever, only inside.

Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl

Despite those criticisms, I did find it a…well, “pleasant” isn’t really the word for a book about a traumatic civil war, although I suppose it could be applied to the love story…well told mystery of a woman’s disappearance in a period that deserves far more attention than it gets.

[1] Never Hemingway. Not a fan, to say the least, but this isn’t a review of any of Papa’s works.

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