A little warning about Fernanda Melchor. I said that her novel Hurricane Season is a masterpiece, and it absolutely is. But I also started reading her This Isn’t Miami, and it isn’t simply bad. It’s BAD.
Contrary to the promotional blurb, this isn’t a short story collection. These are newspaper articles or sometimes little drafts for investigative research pieces. Melchor is a journalist by profession. The articles are poorly written and quite shallow. They take the most interesting stories that happened in Veracruz in the past 40 years and reduce them to a collection of sternly delivered leftist slogans.
Melchor was going to write Hurricane Season in the same style. Thank God in heaven, she didn’t.
So please be forewarned.
I hope Melchor writes only novels from now on.
