Review: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Goodreads

“They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Young Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch.”

Release Date: March 31st, 2020

Genre(s): Adult fiction, literary fiction, contemporary, mystery

Publisher: New Directions

Pages: 224

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Synopsis

When a small town outcast known as “The Witch” is found dead, speculation runs loose and investigations begin. Hurricane Season explores this small Mexican town and its villagers as unreliable narrators as they slowly reveal what happened, in addition to the utterly immoral and horrifying events that take place within the village.

Review

I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when first picking up Hurricane Season. It’s a book with a very vague synopsis, as well as one where it’s story lies in its characters more than anything. 

In many ways, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read. The prose is long and winding, the scenes are very intense, and the details are extremely graphic. In the exploration of the village and the characters that reside in it, Melchor bluntly introduces the harsh, violent, and sad realities that these characters live. This is absolutely a book that will force you into discomfort as you are faced with the intense situations that the villagers are forced to live in and how it connects with the overall story. 

Melchor is very strategic in what she chooses to share in each chapter, and this contributes to the overall story in a way that I feel could not have worked better any other way. While the descriptions in this book are so graphic and intense, they’re there to demonstrate the tiring and continuously traumatic reality of the characters’ situations, instead of existing solely to shock readers every now and again. 

But despite how intense this book was, it was also one that was difficult to put down. The overall pace of Hurricane Season combined with the long-winding sentence structures had me reading this in much longer sittings. There were so many issues to unpack with this book. The young characters of this novel are paired with increasingly mature situations. And while these situations include extreme poverty, rape, murder, and abuse in all forms, the commentary around these events were fleshed out so much, despite it being such a short book. Hurricane Season definitely feels like the kind of book where you’ll have a different experience each time you read it, because there’s so much commentary to be had around so many different issues. 

The only negative thing I will say about this book is that, despite feeling that the sentence structure did contribute to the book positively, I also felt that it was confusing at times. There are some switches between topics in the middle of these long-winding sentences, and it is something that can be difficult to follow. 

All in all, Hurricane Season is unlike any book I’ve read thus far. It’s definitely one I want to revisit in the future as I do think it’s one that will lead to having newfound thoughts the second time around. And while this book is extremely intense and will be extremely difficult emotionally, it’s a story that absolutely needs to be told and a story that absolutely needs to be heard.