Review: Mi Bárbara by Laura Andreu

Review of the book “My Bárbara” by Laura Andreu Noguera.
By Raquel San Martín Rodríguez

A tribute to those who did not want war
May 1917. The Navarro de Villalba family arrives in the city of Granada. Bárbara, the orphaned niece of Pablo Navarro, a sugar magnate, suddenly changes the dark world of a French convent for one flooded with the light of Andalusia when she goes to live with a family she didn’t know she had.

In years full of ideas, in the unique Granada of the boom sugar mill, from Lorca and Falla, between studies of medicine and poetry, Bárbara and her family live a vibrant and bright time, full of hope but also turbulent, which little by little will darken until finally extinguished with the outbreak of the civil war. who left for the country. The start of the war will bring with it a tragic event that will be the last twist for Barbara that will mark her destiny.

My personal assessment:

My Barbara It is a love story: that of a doctor who did not want war, and who fought, like so many others, to resist. For not getting carried away by her madness and for surviving in a world that was not for her. It is a cry for peace, life and memory. It is a fight for freedom.

Mi Barbara It takes place in Granada before and during the civil war. Barbara’s life takes an unexpected turn when she changes the dark, cold and gloomy convent of Saint-Clément-sur-la-Roche located somewhere in the French Pyrenees for the light and heat of Granada. Barbara was raised in that convent since she was a newborn since she was orphaned, but one day her uncle Pablo, brother of her father, appears to change her life and take her with him and her family to the luminous Granada.

And there the years will pass, with her uncles and her cousin Flavia learning and becoming interested in everything that surrounds her, a curious and clever girl who learned from a very young age the love of medicine and literature.

But as the years go by, the darkness that will loom over the country begins to materialize.

But not everything within barbarism is darkness, there is also room for love, the love that Barbara feels for Alonso.

Laura Andreu Noguera has transported us to one of the saddest times in our current history, the civil war. Countless books have been written on this topic and little can be said about it, but what about those people who did not want war? With those people who were neither on one side nor the other? Well, Barbara is one of those people who did not want to fight on either side but that damn war forces her to position herself on the Republican side and therefore try to escape from it.

With a setting at the beginning of the novel on the theme of the sugar factories, the sugar cane plantations in Granada and with characters as important as Federico García Lorca himself, with whom I have ended up totally in love.

But as the conflict progresses, the setting becomes oppressive, sad and decadent, with those stories that come with barbarism where death and devastation surround everything.

I have enjoyed each and every one of the characters, Barbara with that determination that led her from a very young age to dedicate herself to what she loves most, which is medicine, facing the narrow views of the time when a woman studied at the university. With Alonso with his political ideas, with that loyalty and with his desire for the world to change. With Pablo, with Flavia, the acemilera, the crab, Rosita and many others who make this story a great story.

In conclusion, a book that I have enjoyed and suffered in equal parts, that I have closed with a feeling of sadness for everything that happened, for the people who stayed along the way and for those other people who fought not to go crazy at the same time. remember what happened. A book about war but also about love and poetry, a book that reminds us that both sides did horrible things and that in the midst of that barbarism there were people like Barbara who did not want that madness. Books like this remind us that there was a time when hate prevailed, so we just have to remember so that it never happens again. Many congratulations to Laura for this first novel, which will undoubtedly be one of the best of the year for me.