Alejo lived quietly with his routine as a policeman in a Gijón police station. But when he had twin girls he was overwhelmed, unable to fulfill his professional tasks, to combine them with his fatherly duties.
Olivia is a good investigator, but her past haunts her. She requested the transfer from Valencia to Asturias and she is not sure if she made a mistake because she does not quite fit in with her new classmates.
A boy lives in the barn of his house. He knows that his mother loves him, because she sometimes visits him and hugs him. He is aware that his father, his grandparents and his brothers hate him. He only sees them on Sundays and they don't even speak to him. He doesn't know his name.
El secreto de Erna (RBA), the latest novel by the Asturian Alicia G. García, travels between the everyday and the historical, although it is still very black and also a story of broken childhoods, of many broken childhoods, that of Olivia , the one about the mysterious boy in the barn, the one about Erna...
“A bad childhood does not necessarily lead to being a bad person, but it is true that what happens in the first years shapes the character and marks the adult”, explains in an interview with La Vanguardia the author who, before dedicating herself to literature, worked for ten years as an educator in a center for minors.
Erna is one of those girls with a difficult childhood. She appears abandoned one night on the road. In the vicinity of that place a man has been killed. Alejo and Olivia try to solve the crime and find out who the little girl is and what has happened to her.
The investigations will lead Olivia to remember her harsh childhood, daughter of a prostitute, her mother locked her in a closet while she was with clients, "a closet that was a way to protect the girl, not a punishment, it was a gesture of affection to isolate her from the bad, from the ugly, from the horror”.
Olivia's terrible secrets (there are more) contrast with the (until recently) quiet life of Alejo. The policeman does not get to everything, he is overwhelmed and he also has to put up with the constant reproaches of his wife, Julia, who is on sick leave, but feels abandoned with the twins. García points out that “motherhood is usually reflected from the female point of view, because the weight falls on the mothers, but I wanted to focus on the man, on the first-time father of twins who also has many difficulties in conciliation” .
With the mystery of Erna, Olivia's memories and Alejo's problems, Alicia G. Garcia puts together a puzzle that leads to a terrible story. A puzzle with two other pieces missing. One is that mysterious barn boy whose reality takes shape as the plot progresses: "I discovered by chance the existence of wolf children, the children born of rape in war, who were disowned and left in no man's land, those who were luckier ended up in orphanages, others on the streets and many, dead”, explains the author who fitted this figure into an intriguing second plot of El secreto de Erna .
A novel that becomes even more exciting thanks to the missing piece, Ross, a character “who only moves for money” and who “doesn't fit in the world, perhaps because he also had a complicated childhood. Her mother, a humble woman, saved to take her to a great school where she always felt inferior”. Ross also has his secrets and it may be the thread that Garcia pulls for an expected second part of El secreto de Erna.
