The other main character is Ana Torres Moreno, a teen who works at Madrid’s Hilton Castellano Hotel.

One of the main characters is Texan Daniel Matheson, an 18-year-old with dreams of becoming a photo-journalist rather than following in the footsteps of his father, a successful oilman. Everyone has some secret, but the secrets of the teens who are native to Spain are far more dangerous and serious than those of their American counterparts. Most of the story is set over the course of a month in Madrid and the characters are mainly teenagers - both Spanish and American - with a few adults thrown in for good measure. Ruta Sepetys does a superb job of setting this stage for her readers, demonstrating through her characters and plot exactly how terrifying the Franco regime was. No, the feeling seems to have been that we should try to make nice with Franco and use economics as a carrot to encourage opening up an incredibly repressive society. On one hand, we had fought a war to defeat fascism, on the other hand at least Spain wasn’t communist and no one seemed very interested in opening up conflict in Europe. So I guess the long and short of it is that after WWII and the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, the US’s relationship with Spain was … complicated. Catholics seem a little too comfortable with fascism, too. And I have heard the tale many times (including from an archivist who would have known) that a mid-1930s yearbook from one of our fine Catholic high schools was dedicated to Francisco Franco.

In Cincinnati, where I grew up, there is a replica of the statue of Romulus and Remus at the entrance to one of our parks, a gift to the people of Cincinnati from Mussolini.

This is key, of course, because the US has always been more comfortable with fascism than communism. I mean, sure, I knew about the Spanish Civil War, seen as a dress rehearsal for WWII, the Falange versus Republicans, and I remember that the Soviet Union supported the Republican forces against the fascists. The Fountains of Silence is set in Spain, 1957, and it revealed to me how unaware I was of the oppressive fascist regime that existed in Spain until the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1975.

I thought I knew my European history pretty well, but a YA novel just showed me a glaring gap in my knowledge. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a PhD in history, specializing in the USSR, and back in the day, I taught courses like Western Civ and the 20th Century.

The fountains of silence ruta sepetys