For that reason, we think it is important to provide a trigger warning in this review. The anti-blackness and transphobia that is depicted, as well as descriptions of sexual abuse, can be overwhelming and require reading breaks for even the strongest amongst us. Melchor, who has cited Cormac McCarthy ( Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men) as an influence, is just as unflinching as McCarthy in her descriptions of violence. At one point we travel through the consciousness of a young pregnant teenage girl named Norma who has run away from her abusive home because she is pregnant next, Melchor places us in the head of the stepfather who raped her. The journey through these different perspectives is harrowing and at times, horrific. The novel begins with a group of boys stumbling upon the dead body of the neighborhood witch, which they find in a river, “peeping out from the yellow foam on the water’s surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.” Melchor then fiercely rotates through the perspectives of several different characters as the reader tries to understand who is responsible for the witch’s murder. Melchor, who is already known as one of Mexico’s most talented novelists, made her debut in the United States this week, with Sophie Hughes’ English language translation of the original (Temporada de Huracanes). The sense of rage and bewilderment exhibited by 8M protestors can be found in the pages of Fernanda Melchor’s complex and astonishing novel Hurricane Season, which explores the horror of femicide through a story about an imaginary village in Mexico in which a witch is found dead.

One of the youngest victims was a 7-year-old girl named Fatima, whose body was found in a plastic bag the day after she disappeared from school holding a strange woman’s hand. Since January, hundreds of women and girls have been murdered in Mexico. Last month, tens of thousands of women in Mexico took to the streets to protest the increasing trend of violence against women, chanting “ Ni una más.” Not one more.

Hurricane season melchor