Welcome to Litsy!

A woman writing about men - a reversal of how men write about women. An interesting perspective. But too forceful, exaggerated and long for my taste.

I get why the foul language, sexual assaults, homophobia, hate crime, pedophilia and murder are needed for this novel to work - to prove the point that real evil is within all of us and is in plain sight. But, after a point, it felt too much. Came on too strong.

This book isn‘t for everyone.

This book broke me! I was crying because the story is so bleak but beautifully written

Murder in a Mexican village. No lie, a tough read. Brutal, saturated with violence & abuse. Drug abuse, predators, homophobia, rape, a catalog of pain. Parental figures who threaten disobedience, parental figures as accessories to crime. Long, threading sentences in an engaging vernacular, like a porch stoop talk—or a confession. Graphic depictions. Interwoven stories, language rough but sometimes incandescent. Strong translation. Trans. 2020

‘there was something evil and terrible inside her for wanting that contact, that crude embrace, and for wanting it to last forever‘.

my penpal recommended hurricane season. i read it in one sitting, sucked into the dense, overflowing prose. set in a gang-controlled, unnamed mexican town as hurricane season approaches, this book is unafraid to show the darkest parts of human experience (read with caution: it is extremely graphic). each chapter is a new stream of consciousness, building to reveal the crime, and characters build and deepen as we see them through different eyes.

This book is a horrific nightmare, just as it intends to be.

Melchor overpacks relentless violence into just 210 pages, forcing you to sit in discomfort with the ugliest realities human beings can create…and somehow endure.

I think it‘s an important work to exist. The author is fiercely talented, and honestly brave to write so unsparingly. But I struggle with the notion of “recommending” it to anyone, given how awful the book made me feel.

Between the pages-long run-on sentences, the unnecessary abuse of certain characters, and the fact that it doesn‘t seem to be about anything, this book is not working for me. I‘m trying to read the entire 2020 NBA longlist for translated literature (I‘ve finished fiction and have one nonfiction left), but I can‘t with this one. At least I tried it!

Excellent. A strong, brutal book about the death of a woman (the Witch) & the characters surrounding her, in a small village in Mexico. The writing is visceral, lively & keeps you turning the page despite the violent language of the narrators. The characters feel real & you empathise with them & see how their poverty, culture of misogyny & lack of hope drives their actions. Other books seem weak & trivial by comparison. Highly recommended.

Excellent. A strong, brutal book about the death of a woman (the Witch) & the characters surrounding her, in a small village in Mexico. The writing is visceral, lively & keeps you turning the page despite the violent language of the narrators. The characters feel real & you empathise with them & see how their poverty, culture of misogyny & lack of hope drives their actions. Other books seem weak & trivial by comparison. Highly recommended.

This is me. At work. After knocking over the puzzles. My coworker pulled her phone out to photograph me so fast it was almost like she had set me up. 😂😂🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️#booksellerlife

Holy run-on sentence, Batman!

This book is violent, dark, raw, and powerful. A woman known only as The Witch is found murdered, and a series of narrators lead us in circles around her death. With each we learn more about the realities of poverty, addiction, abuse, and violence against women in the impoverished setting.

The writing style took me a while to adjust to but well worth the effort. #integrateyourshelf

Amidst the chaos of packing christam away at the weekend I read this story of life in Mexican slums. It left me exhausted by the dreadful life the characters led, the violence , sexual abuse , and wasted lives. There are a number of characters whose tales all interconnect around the murder of a 'witch' whose body is discovered in a sewage outlet by children.
A tough rd but interesting nevertheless + constructed with skill as thing slowly emerge.

I was so excited to hear the lovely @readingismagical as a guest with Traci on the most recent episode of The Stacks!! Head over to wherever you listen to podcasts to hear them talk about their fave reads of 2020. They had a great conversation 😍

Ok, the cover for this book is stunning but I ordered the wrong book....I wanted the tagged book by Fernanda Melchor NOT Nicole Melleby 😩😩😩

For the final episode in 2020 of the podcast, I am joined by two BookTubers Weird Book Book Club and Derek Maine to talk about our favourite books of the year.

I felt as trapped inside the multiple voices as the characters seem to be, mired in their remote Mexican village, where any tenderness is crushed by poverty, violence, addictions and greed. The chapters are dense pages in single paragraphs and I had to take breaks from the oppressive atmosphere, yet felt compelled to see this sordid tale through to the end. I will never forget it. #LGBTQ #Translation by Sophie Hughes

Because I never wanted kids & your boyfriend in there knows it only too well because you‘ve got to be open about these things, why go around playing the martyr, better to be open & say it how it is & for everyone to be on the same page: this children business is bullshit, bull-fucking-shit; there‘s no way to dress it up: in the end, all kids are a burden, spongers, parasites who suck the life & all your blood from you.

Woke up missing Portugal today.

Lunchtime reading view #weekendlibrarian

To me, some parts of this were 2 ⭐, some 5. The style takes a bit of getting used to (each chapter is basically a run-on paragraph@ with few pauses) but once it sucked me in I couldn't put it down. It's a tough read about a town devastated by poverty that is affected by the murder of the town witch. Melchor draws from folklore, horror tropes in contemporary lit and focuses heavily on gender violence to weave these different testimonies together.

Bliss ☀️

Melchor's MB International Shortlisted novel opens with the discovery of the corpse of The Witch in an unnamed small Mexican village. The ensuing investigation offers a portrait of this town & the passions & hatreds of its deeply flawed inhabitants. Melchor kicks things off with a gritty realism coupled with a foreboding atmosphere & sinister undercurrents. I was immediately reminded of Goya's Black Paintings. I am hesitant to recommend this👇

New episode: A great talk with Derek from Read The World as we talk about his reading life and Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes) #womenintranslation

Hurricane Season isn‘t for the faint hearted (trigger warnings: basically everything). It‘s a relentless, graphic, violent narrative about life in a Mexican village. It‘s demanding of its reader. The nature of the prose and the magically real framing of the narrative won‘t be for everyone. Melchor tells a necessary story about the pervasive violence against Mexican women in such communities. #indiebuddyreads

Gah! I‘m admitting defeat and putting this one on hold for the time being. It‘s intense. The sentences run on for years, and leave you claustrophobic, exhausted. And the subject matter is dark and relentless, another from the #BookerInternational2020 which doesn‘t seem to have too many glimmers of light. I probably will come back to this - the writing‘s effective and I‘d like to see where the story goes. But not right now.

I‘ve got to tell you: this is a HEAVY read, more horror than whodunnit. Trigger warnings for literally everything you can imagine. It has these beautiful long lyrical sentences that lure you in, but the visceral, carnal, brutal nature of the events it depicts are not for the faint of heart. A challenging and confronting book. Extended review here: http://keepingupwiththepenguins.com/new-releases/ #BooksInTranslation #BookerPrize

My mum very kindly bought this for me on our day trip to Kingston today to celebrate my birthday. I‘m not 24 til next Friday but my parents are going away on holiday then (for my mums bday which is 3 days after mine) so I went home this weekend to see them. Very grateful and excited to own this one for the #bookerinternational2020 list!