Author: Pablo Albo
- Fiction
- Algar Editorial
- ISBN: 9788498455151
- Release Date: 10-01-2012
-Reviewed by: Eduardo de Lamadrid
Pablo Albo is a self-styled professional storyteller. He has published more than 30 books for children and young adults, some of which have been translated into English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. His books have received several literary prizes and three of them have appeared in The White Ravens, the annual list of the 250 best books for juveniles prepared by Internationale Jugundbibliotek of Munich.
The book under review, Para una vez que me abrazan (Once I'm Embraced), is based on real historical events, but embellished with supernatural motifs. The story-line is fairly simple. The adolescent Ulises arrives by boat at the island of Tabarcla with the rest of his class. And what first appears to be an interesting visit to an island off the Alicante coast that the class is studying, becomes instead a marvelous and also terrifying adventure that Ulises will experience along with his classmate Eva. Not only do his classmates play a trick on him and lock him in a tower that looms over the island, but also the boat leaves him behind with Eva. Since Ulises fancies himself to be in love with Eva, he is very excited to be spending a night alone with her. However, he soon realizes that his major worry is not to capture Eva's attention, but rather to find an explanation to the strange events which they witness. Because Tabarcla is not an ordinary island. Mysterious strangers with green eyes who pursue them, a phantasmagoric mariner, an old woman who is much too old, and a secret hidden for hundreds of years: all become intertwined with their fate.
The first person narration is deftly achieved and sparkles with ironical touches. We are before an uncommon narrator, and we are first introduced to Ulises as "el Rarito", or "the strange one". And he is wonderfully strange. We don't know exactly how old he is, but he does demonstrate some maturity at times. Ulises loves to turn things over a thousand times in his head, to offer unusual perspectives and points of view, to consider and reconsider. Sometimes the reader is compelled to laugh at the stories he comes up with in his head. Yet sometimes he is infantile and silly, letting himself be carried away by sudden, ephemeral and irrational urges, and also be dominated by Eva, who crosses him at every turn. Eva, whose name alludes to Eve, the first woman (and indeed she is Ulises' first woman), is like her namesake, fickle and indecisive, and is at one point compared to Circe, the sorceress who bewitches Ulysses in the Odyssey. There are various allusions to the mythological Ulysses in the novel, but these are not developed further, and add little to the story.
The story itself, however, is entertaining and captures the reader's attention from the first page, since the very beginning poses a series of problems and questions, which the reader does not understand fully, and as the fast-paced story progresses, are explained or resolved in part. The plausible dialogue, peppered with colloquialisms, adds to the rapid rhythm. Yet the final resolution does seem a bit hurried, and more explanation would have been helpful to young readers at the end. For example, the explanation of the "ofras" ritual remains opaque. After consulting various dictionaries and Googling "ofras", this reader is still in the dark about the precise meaning of this term.
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