Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is full of power, anger and honesty!
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, here is a book that has captured many people’s attention. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor is full of raw emotion, brutal honesty and an unravelling portrayal of the death of a witch in a small town in Mexico.
Firstly a warning: this book is not for the faint-hearted. This book requires bravery to open your mind to hardship and untamed anger. It does nothing to hide away from the horrors of society and instead shines a light directly towards them. Dangling the idea of magic and fairy-tale before dropping us in her hopeless reality through the eyes of vivid interconnecting characters.
Fernanda Melchor’s writing style draws you right into the minds of her characters using long, winding and expressive sentences which meld into unbroken stifling paragraphs. If you removed all of the swear words from the book the word count would significantly diminish, this I believe will tell you a lot, for it is not some anger at a certain time but constant brutally honest anger that runs through the entire book. Even though the book is told through the eyes of different characters the anger and emotion through it remains constant, strong and forceful. Only in one section did it feel more of the author’s response than the character’s, the rest rang completely true with the situations and troubles. Never before has a book presented anger in such a startling and gripping way.
The story shows us a society marked by poverty, drugs, sex, fear and judgement. Each chapter (There are few and they are large) represents a different important character, each intertwined and building up to the death of the local witch. Now, this is not a fairy tale, the witch is an outcast on the edge of town who helps with remedies and spells for the women, who sneak down to buy them, and encourages the visits of men, who have heard the witch will pay for sex. Of course, we want to know what happened to this witch, but that is only one facet of this book, there is so much of relationships, lives, choices, lack of choices and far more. Hurricane Season is special, in the unique, for the style of writing, the story and for opening people’s eyes in many ways. The emotions and actions in this book will surround you as you read it, consuming you until you finish!
