Thursday 16 January 2014

Domingo's Angel by Jenny Twist

About the author


Jenny Twist was born in York and brought up in the West Yorkshire mill town of Heckmondwike, the eldest grandchild of a huge extended family.
She left school at fifteen and went to work in an asbestos factory. After working in various jobs, including bacon-packer and escapologist's assistant (she was The Lovely Tanya), she returned to full-time education and did a BA in history at Manchester and post-graduate studies at Oxford.
She stayed in Oxford working as a recruitment consultant for many years and it was there that she met and married her husband, Vic.
In 2001 they retired and moved to Southern Spain where they live with their rather eccentric dog and cat. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, knitting and attempting to do fiendishly difficult logic puzzles.

She has written two novels - Domingo's Angel - a love story set in Franco's Spain and harking back to the Spanish Civil War and beyond - and All in the Mind - a contemporary novel about an old woman who mysteriously begins to get younger.

She has also written an anthology of short stories - Take One At Bedtime - and co-written the anthology Bedtime Shadows - with the inimitable Tara Fox Hall.
She has contributed short stories to many other anthologies, of which two - Doppelganger and Uncle Vernon are being released as short ebooks.
Her first self-published ebook, Away With the Fairies was released in September 2012.
Mantequero was originally published in Winter Wonders by Whimsical Publishing and has just been released as a short ebook.



About the book



DOMINGO’S ANGEL – Jenny Twist

When Angela turns up in a remote Spanish mountain village, she is so tall and so thin and so pale that everyone thinks she is a ghost or a fairy or the dreadful mantequero that comes in the night and sucks the fat from your bones.
But Domingo knows better. “Soy Angela,” she said to him when they met – “I am an angel.” Only later did he realise that she was telling him her name and by then it was too late and everyone knew her as Domingo’s Angel.
This is the story of their love affair. But it is also the story of the people of the tiny mountain village – the indomitable Rosalba - shopkeeper, doctor, midwife and wise woman, who makes it her business to know everything that goes on in the village; Guillermo, the mayor, whose delusions of grandeur are rooted in his impoverished childhood; and Salva the Baker, who risked his life and liberty to give bread to the starving children.
The events in this story are based on the real experiences of the people of the White Villages in Southern Spain and their struggle to keep their communities alive through the years of war and the oppression of Franco’s rule.


My review
This book will enchant you from the start, just as Domingo finds himself enchanted by the red-haired stranger who arrives in his Spanish village and is reported to bark like a dog. The stranger is Angela, an English woman with a guilty secret of her own and who soon makes her mark in the village. This book has all the elements that I personally enjoy, a foreign location, historical backdrop and memorable characters. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters developed in the story and the themes of guilt and forgiveness. Set against the background of the Spanish civil war, Jenny Twist is adept at allowing the story to unfold at its own pace so bit by bit we find out about the way the war affected the main characters.
The whole tale is pulled together by the matriarchal Rosalba with flashbacks to explain each character’s story.
The evocation of Spain in the early fifties and the backdrop of the war in the thirties are extremely well portrayed and easy to imagine. This book will tug your heartstrings as you find out what happened when neighbour was set against neighbour in an effort to survive. The story does end on a positive note and like all truly great reads, I was sad when I came to the end.

Best for...

Those who like a good story with a Spanish historical background

My rating

5/5  I thoroughly enjoyed this story

Links

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