A review by meghaha
The Time in Between by María Dueñas

3.0

My suspension of disbelief crumbled during the last third of the book, so that's why I'm feeling lukewarm about The Time in Between overall. For the first two-thirds of the book, I could believe in main character Sira's transformation from a poor seamstress into a self-made, elegant designer after she'd been conned out of her fortune by her lover. The flow of this book was really smooth. And I loved the settings -- Madrid pre and post Spanish Civil War and WWII, Morocco, and Portugal. But I could not get over the third part of the book in which Sira becomes a spy. There's no reason for it: she's set up her life nicely in Morocco and has finally been reunited with her mother. It's not as if Sira is at all political, has lived through the horrors of war, hates Nazis, has personal or emotional investment in the war, or has any awareness of what's happening internationally. Without these key reasons, you don't just uproot your life and put yourself in danger on a whim. Sewing for the high class clientele to pay off her debt made total sense while she was in Morocco, but from when she moved back to Madrid onwards, I couldn't suspend disbelief anymore. No joke, her undercover 'Arabic' spy name Arish Agoriuq, is just her name Sira Quiroga back to front. I dearly hope no credible spy has ever used their real name back-to-front as a cover! Then, although it's made quite clear that she only speaks Spanish and maybe some basic English/German she's set off to Portugal on an international spy mission. At one point, she spies on a meeting between Germans and Portuguese, but is able to understand everything they say, so they must've been speaking in Spanish? But why would they do that in a meeting amongst themselves? Unless I'm mistaken and Spanish is actually the natural go-to common language when Portuguese and Germans meet....

En fin, I just really wish this novel hadn't taken this ridiculous I'm-a-British-spy turn which didn't make any sense and which seriously defrayed my suspension of disbelief. It was otherwise a quite charming novel so the unbelievable third part was a true shame.