YMMV / The Shadow of the Wind

• Alternate Character Interpretation: When everyone claims Antoni Fortuny, Julián's stepfather to be pure evil, several characters point out this is hard to believe. We later discover that Antoni Fortuny was really just a guy messed-up by a very religious upbringing who realized too late how much he loved and depended on his wife and son. When Julián comes back, he takes him back in without asking any questions. He also dies holding a photo of Julián and Sophie.
  Barceló: If everyone insists on a man being a monster either he was a saint or we don't know the whole story.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The strange, golden-eyed old man, described as a "deserter angel", whom Daniel meets at the end of the book. He's just appears looking crazy, wishes good luck to Daniel, and is never mentioned again.
• Complete Monster: Francisco Javier Fumero, the corrupt chief of police in Barcelona, relishes the power his position brings him. As a boy, Fumero tortured small animals as an outlet for his sadism, and when he discovered Julián Carax, the one boy to treat him kindly, and Penelope, who Fumero lusted after, were together, he attempted to murder Julián and devoted his life to destroying him and Penelope alike. Fumero sent his men to kill Julián and personally murdered a woman who loved Julián for helping him. In the years that passed, Fumero terrorized the populace of Barcelona as an uniformed thug, torturing those who caught his ire. One luckless man named Fermín was held and beaten before Fumero tortured him with a blowtorch. When the young hero of the novel, Daniel Sempere, closes in on the buried story of Julián Carax, Fumero wastes no time in attempting to kill him and all who know the truth as well. Cruel, sadistic, violent and insatiably power-hungry, Fumero represents how far a once almost pitiable boy can fall.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In Japan, nothing less, the novel reached the first place in Kodansha's Bunko Translation Mystery Best 10 the same year it was released there.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Fermín is the most memorable character in the novel, and he eventually got his own featured installment (or at least a novel 70% focused on him) on The Prisoner of Heaven.
• Tear Jerker: Gosh, where to start?
  • How about when Daniel talks to Isaac, just after his daughter, Nuria, has been murdered?
  • Or Penelope's death?
  • Or Miquel Moliner's entire life?
  • Or Jacinta Coronado's fate?
• The Scrappy: Daniel is probably the least popular of all protagonists written by Zafón, due to how passive, socially awkward and just plain jerkass he is (and the next books sometimes make it worse), especially given that he lacks the wit or guts of protagonists like Martín (The Angel's Game) or Óscar (Marina).

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