In a small Mexican village known as La Matosa, a woman's corpse is found floating in the river. It's La Bruja, the local healer, who is equally ostracized and sought by locals, and who has been brutally murdered and left to perish in the canal.

This book isn't about who done it or why. It's a claustrophobic depiction of structural violence, that omnipresent force that follows La Matosa inhabitants no matter where they go.

They can't escape it, and neither can we, the readers. With single-paragraph chapters and sentences often pages long, Melchor traps us in this web of violence. We can't look away even if we wanted to. But we don't really want to. It's like driving by a car crash (another reviewer initially said on here): we don't want to see blood, we hope there isn't any, but we can't keep from staring and checking for ourselves.

Hurricane Seasons is graphic, sickening, extremely uncomfortable, and trigger warnings too extensive to list. And all that perhaps because it's also a too familiar story. Too believable. Too real.

Melchor set her tale in her motherland of Mexico. Still, it could easily be a story about anywhere else in the world where poverty, misogyny, and violence are givens.

Melchor created a masterpiece! I've never read anything like it.