Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Hurricane Season

Reviews tagging 'Racial slurs'

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

23 reviews

oversherin's review

challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Not rating this book because it is not my taste - but I respect the hell out of it.

This book is incredibly violent and dark. You get right into the mind of the characters who are deeply troubled and hateful people who are wrecked by their environment. Chapters are long dark spirals into the depths of these characters and their darkest thoughts imaginable. Despite this, Melchor is very skilled in giving them just enough humanity that I empathized with them and wanted to stick it out to the end. As other reviewers have said, this book is deeply, disturbingly, honest in a way I have never read before. To me, the hardest part of this book is that most of the characters are children who are wrapped up in the worst of the world. The run-on prose took adjustment, but I found it very natural by middle.

Overall, I thought the story was compelling and timeless. I gritted my teeth through the whole book and had to scan some chapters because I just couldn't stomach it. However, I respect this book and the stories it's telling. There is more truth to this book than I'd like to face. It definitely affected me in an artful way.

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snovella's review

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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ceco_'s review

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dark sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I struggled to write a review that would do this book justice. If you have the time, I recommend you read M John Harrison and Anthony Cummin's reviews (both published by the Guardian).

In short, this is a brutal book and it's not going to be for everyone. The reading experience is shocking, repulsive, but its lingering effect is profound.

A local Witch is found dead, throat slit, floating in a canal. What follows is a whirlwind exploration of life in a rural Mexican town - its constricting familial relations, sexual violence, and deadly masculinity.

Besides the 'bookending' chapters that function as an introduction and conclusion, each chapter of Hurricane Season is a different character's "retelling" of the circumstances of the murder. I use quotation marks because, truthfully, it's less of a retelling and more of a character study showcasing that person's life, motivations and anxieties, with clues to the Witch's death threaded in between, leaving the reader to piece together what happened and why certain events were interpreted in a particular way.

It's undoubtedly a challenging read, but one that will stick with me for a long time.

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s4ily's review

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dark medium-paced

3.0

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amelietherin's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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elchivovivo's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A tour de fucking force.

Each chapter is a single paragraph with little or no room for breathing.

Melchor changes narrative voices like a boxer delivers his punches. And yet, the story flows like water.

The language is pure, and i am curious to see how anyone could translate this dense, boiling, gulf- Mexican dialect into another language. Or even to see how a non-mexican spanish speaker would absorb all the local slang.

What wrenches the heart is that the story, the darkness, the characters, are all realistic (if not based on true people). It reflects the hopeless trajectory of our country, which in spite of its beauty and depth seems to be cosmically, cosmogonically thirsting for blood drawn with violence.

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