Book Review: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Hey there everyone! Welcome to Tales and Texts. I'm your host Nisha, and welcome to another book review. In today's episode, we're going to be reviewing "Hurricane Season" written by Fernanda Melchor. This book has been translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes into English, and the audible narrators are Anastelle Castillo, Tim Pabon and Anna Osorio. 

Hurricane Season is this dark,  Gothic, masochistic book which is based somewhere in Mexico and the book follows the life the lives of four different people, one of whom is the central figure who ties everyone else together. The book starts off with a murder and the person who's murdered is considered by the local villagers to be a witch and people have different reactions to the murder of the witch. Some are ecstatic, and some believe that she used to be the devil incarnate and was dancing with the devil. Some felt she deserved it, while other people actually feel sorry for her. The rest of the book focuses on different characters, who are in some way shape or form connected to this witch - the person who's been murdered brutally. 

So, one of the main themes or energies of this book is performative masochism. Honestly, right off the bat, I do want to let you know that there are a ton of trigger warnings for this book - homophobia, transphobia rape, murder, foul language, performative masochism, violence in the form of vehicular assault and weaponry assault, drugs, alcoholism - you name it, this book has some sequence or some storyline or narrative pertaining to that trigger warning. So, I want to let you know that this book is not for everyone. Another reason this book might not be for everyone is because of the way in which it is written and the way in which it is narrated. This book - Hurricane Season - actually has pages and pages of sentences that just do not stop there is no 'Full Stop' in between the sentences. The words are just running into each other and running off course, meandering across the whole narrative and just going in circles, making complicated scenarios seem even more complicated. When you listen to it on Audible, it's almost as if the narrators are breathless because they have to constantly keep talking, because there's not a single period in many pages. 

This book is actually very hard for me to review because I have very conflicted feelings about this book and also I don't want to give any spoilers about the story and that's why I'm kind of keeping it very skeletal. This book is set against the backdrop of the murder of the witch of a village and the people involved are in some way or another related to this person and we look at all of their narratives. We look at all of their life, prior to their meeting the murder victim and also, what happens after the murder.

One main message of this book which I took away, was how initially the book starts off with the whole conventional, stereotypical trope of witches being evil, withes being bad, witchcraft being bad and witchcraft is consorting with the devil. But ultimately, when you actually look at this book from an overarching perspective, you realize that the real evil, the real demons and devils are actually inside of us. It is normal people going on with their day-to-day lives, who have our normal frustrations, our unmet desires, who are oppressed and subjected to violence & assault, oppressive laws by our communities & by our government. We are the kind of people who carry these very strong, negative sentiments that can actually rot us from within and create circumstances where we actually act upon the evil within us. 

I think ultimately, that is the backbone of this book, but it's written in a way that is very strong, very forceful and also very authentic. But it was also just a little too much. The reason I say this, is because of the ton of trigger warnings here. Every second word is a foul word, every action that takes place, every behavior that is exhibited by these characters, is in some shape or form violent. It's in some way or form an assault of some kind. It is a very morally challenging book and it takes a very strong stomach and a very strong spine to get through. You will be confronted with the worst kind of people in any society and yet these people are not an exception. Oftentimes, they are the rule because they represent the rest of us. It's just that they are outwardly expressing these behaviors, while most of us repress these behaviors and these sentiments within us. 

I know that a lot of people might not agree with this review of mine, but that's exactly how I feel. Although this book comes on way too strong,  I liked how authentic it was because I do believe that these kinds of conversations that happen in the book, do happen in real life. 

There's another observation I want to discuss. While I do not presume to know the gender which the author prefers for themselves or the pronouns that they would like to assign to themselves; just from a superficial glance, this book really looks like something that's written by a woman. But a woman's perspective of how men behave. The reason I want to actually touch upon this is because, in a lot of books that you read, you'll see men writing about women. It is men looking at women and then imagining the kind of conversations that women would have. It is men looking at women and imagining the kind of lives they would lead. It is men looking at women and imagining what kind of challenges they would face or experience. It is men looking at women and imagining what they might want out of love, out of life for themselves. So there is that kind of gap in understanding between the genders in many books and it's interesting to see how the roles have been reversed in "Hurricane Season". We see Fernanda writing about these young boys and this older man and just constructing this narrative around them; writing their conversations, writing their life experiences. So it's flipping the literary narrative and I think that's a really interesting perspective.

 Based on the reviews that I read of this book, the author was trying to really show the deviant aspect of society - the deviance that exists in any society and in any community. While that did come across, it just felt a little too much for me. 

So, do I recommend this book? Yeah, go ahead. You can read it. It's an interesting read if you are open to trying out something that is this morally ambiguous and also in some cases just morally wrong. Because I don't think by any definition, murder, rape, homophobia or transphobia is morally correct. So I think a lot of these things are completely morally wrong. Go ahead, try it out. Your experience might be different from mine or your experience might be exactly like mine. Let me know in the comments down below, what you thought about "Hurricane Season". 

Tarot cards for this book

I felt this book had a combination of the Devil and the Tower, with the emperor as the dominant character energy. They are all major Arcana cards. The emperor card I chose, because of the performative masochism element. The emperor is a card that indicates external action - behaving like a man's man, trying to gain control & power over somebody else. 

The Devil resonated with me, because of (obviously) the primary concept of this entire book circling around this witch and her supposed interactions with the devil. But how the real demons in society are not the people who are dubbed witches, but it's the evils within us. 

The Tower to me represented the crumbling of society in this book. We meet this community and these people when they are on the cusp of crumbling into nothingness when the entire foundation of society is breaking. Yet, at the same time, the tower does represent a potential for rebuilding and you see that despite all this damage and destruction, there is still something left standing. Whether what is left standing is something positive or if it's negative - that's something up for question and debate. However, this shows that in the face of calamity, the world still keeps going on; whether it takes a direction that we approve of or not, that's entirely different. 

So yeah, it's a morally complicated book. Interesting. I would give it three out of five stars, purely because of how different it is compared to my usual reads. 

Alright, if you've stuck around with me so far, thank you for watching. I'll see you next time on Tales and Texts. 

- Nisha Prakash