A review by enairabutcher
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

challenging dark sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Intentionally claustrophobic, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season eliminates paragraph breaks, waxes poetic in near unending sentences, and limits chapters to match the themes of this dark, haunting, and visceral novel. As readers, our perspective on the death of The Witch, who she is, how she came to die, unfold chapter by chapter as we get to know the residents and passersby of a small Mexican village, where poverty, abuse, and addiction plague the people, many of whom care little to improve their situations, grim and depraved as they are, fixated on gossip, rumours that propel the narrative, in its limited view, forward toward something, nay, nothing, that can be considered closure. Such are the lives explored in these pages, fleeting, ending in lightless tunnels, unable to see a path away from the rough hand they were dealt, throwing blame at those who cross them, deserved or not; a metaphor for the cycle of abuse, of trauma, of poverty, of addiction, of depravity, of hunger — all the evil that humanity faces but cannot name, not without pause or reflection, as offered in this violent fiction. The nameless Girl who grows up alone, abandoned, only to find communion with those who care not for her wellbeing, who taunt and tatter her broken soul, the families shaped by prostitution and lies, investing in gods and tinctures and remedies that do little to lay bare the truth, the child who escapes one hell to find another, a mother too soon, unable to see the truth of her relationships just as those around her are blind to her suffering. This is how Hurricane Season gathers its cast of characters, leaving you, the reader, to consider how hope might find its way through all this darkness, replete with profanity and sex, dehumanizing, inhumane, leaving you shaken, enraged, and, if you are anything like me, questioning — of why and how and again why and how the world can turn a blind eye. 
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