The events that led to the Witch’s death slowly form out of those long paragraphs. These chapters are also emotionally hard to read, as characters recount the abuse they’ve suffered or inflicted on others. If you lose your place in the long, long paragraphs, it takes effort to find your place again. Although I appreciate Melchor’s skill in recreating what really sounds like all of these characters’ inner monologues, these chapters are physically hard to read. This brief chapter is followed by many long, single-paragraph stream of consciousness chapters that dive into the thoughts and histories of other characters who know different pieces of what happened. Hurricane Season begins with the discovery of the Witch’s body in an irrigation ditch. I guess, in the end, I stuck it out because I wanted to know more details of the tangle of events that led to the death of a trans woman known only as the Witch, in the poverty-stricken village of La Matosa. I started skipping things as I got further into the book. This literary mystery set in southern Mexico contains many upsetting passages of frankly pornographic sex and anti-gay language and violence. I don’t know why I finished reading Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor (expertly translated by Sophie Hughes).
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