What I'm Reading: The Bitter Taste of Time, by Béa Gonzalez.
Status: Just finished!
Rating: 4/5

I was so excited to get a copy of Béa Gonzalez's first novel, The Bitter Taste of Time: I read her second book, The Mapmaker's Opera, a couple months back and it instantly became one of my favourites. She has a way of filling your head with images, painting landscapes of words so finely detailed you can't see the brushstrokes. The Bitter Taste of Time is full of sights and smells and sounds and colour. Gonzalez takes us into the beautiful region of Galicia in northern Spain, writing into life a land of green, rain-soaked hills, populated by strong, sorrow-drenched people. We follow a house of extremely memorable and vivid women through four generations, watching as all around them certain things change with the passage of time and others remain unalterably the same as always.

At the heart this novel is a series of tragedies, but the beauty of the book is in the multiple heroines' multiple reactions to those tragedies. These women are so strong, so fierce, and so unique: Gonzalez's storytelling feels so intensely intimate, by the end of the book you feel like you have been reading the histories of women in your own family tree. You will miss and remember these women! Maria la Reina and the bookish and big-hearted Matilde are the ones who make the book for me, along with Matilde's dear Don Miguel.

In short, read this book! It is absolutely beautiful, both in construction and in content. It's a fairly small book, so you can read it quickly or take the time to read it slowly and savour it. :)

Happy reading! All the best,
Erin