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The plot goes like this; there’s this 15-year-old boy, Oscar, living in Barcelona during the late 70's. He studies at a boarding school, he obviously hates it, and secretly goes exploring the city during his free time. At some point, he vanishes for a whole week, without anyone knowing where he could possibly be. And this is when the story begins, a flashback, with Oscar as the narrator. On one of his secret excursions, he stumbles upon a seemingly abandoned, old manor. With his curiosity getting the better of him, he goes inside and he meets Marina, a girl his age, and her father, Germán, a lonely, widowed portrait painter. Once they get to know each other better, Marina tells Oscar about a strange ritual she’s been observing for some time; at the local cemetery, on the fourth Sunday of every month, a woman in black arrives in a black carriage, holding a single rose in her hands. Without uttering a word, she walks up to a grave with no inscription on it, just the emblem of a black butterfly with open wings, and leaves the rose there, only to walk away and disappear again moments later. Once the children decide to follow the carriage and, therefore, the woman in black, they find themselves trying to unravel a gothic mystery around painters, aristocrats, opera singers, circus troupe members, a deranged inventor, grotesque, bloodthirsty puppets and, of course, the eerie atmosphere of the labyrinths of alleyways below and above a magical Barcelona. Some friends asked me why I liked it so much. They also asked if it was because of any plot twist. The whole thing is a plot twist, in my opinion. To be entirely honest, when I bought the book, I expected an easy-going, casually pessimistic gothic love story between Oscar and Marina. But the love story thingy covers up a very small part of the book. The rest is an addictive, insanely enchanting adventure/mystery that kept me hooked until the very last page.