Hurricane Season

This book is a lot of things, none of which are easy.

The first thing I noticed was there were no paragraph breaks. Just... none. The only reprieve the reader gets is when a new chapter starts and there are only a handful of them. Even the sentences snake on for pages at a time, refusing to let the reader take a breath.

It's all intentional and while grating at first, pushing through it unlocks something a lot deeper in this book. Just like Cormac McCarthy writes with sparse punctuation and refuses to use quotation marks for his dialogue, this book trudges forward using punctuation, or the lack thereof, as a bludgeon.

Because this book is brutal. If I had to guess, I'd say that Fernanda Melchor wrote this book angry, and I don't blame her at all. It's a book about poverty. Not about the kind of poverty a lot of books released in the US are about, but agonizing, inescapable poverty punctuated by constant violence. The publishing industry is so filled with books written by those of privilege and wealth that it's refreshing to not read a book about a well-off New Yorker sometimes.

The central premise of the book is that there's a witch in town. She provides a variety of services for the local women, most of which we learn about later on in the book. In a world where the only way to make money and support their family for most of these women is for prostitution, there aren't exactly women's health clinics around, if you catch my drift. This ‘witch' can help, along with other ailments as well.

The story unfolds from the perspective of a few characters, each in their own chapter, all based on the brutal murder of the witch by a few local boys. The reason for the murder unfolds when the reader is taken closer to the act itself by inhabiting the POV of the men responsible, each with a different understanding and reason for being in that van that pulled up to her house that evening.

Let's just say that extreme poverty, exploration of sexuality and the relationship between cycles of abuse, poverty, corruption, and homosexuality all end up tangled in the same web, eventually.

The conscious decision to write the book in this manner gives it a sense of movement, like a makeshift go cart wheeled up to the top of the hill, allowing you to jump in while it's in free fall, forcing you to be along for the ride with no real sense of control. You're just along for the ride, unable to look away from the horror of those rocks at the bottom of the hill.

Just beautiful.