Woah.

I need to get a physical copy of this to read again. I didn't really understand it, but I did at the same time? It was so hypnotizing, and the character work was insane for a book so short. I just need to go through it again to really capture the story properly, and hopefully, I will be less dazed reading it.
Need to read more from this author!!!

If this novella were a person, it’d be a five foot nothing 45 year old woman who is the most observant and wise person you know.

The audiobook for The Summer of the Serpent is a little over 2.5 hours. Throughout, we see snapshots of the lives of the inhabitants of a Guadalajara neighborhood, and one family in particular, one summer in 1977. So, to an extent, this is kind of a ‘slice of life’ story albeit without the tedium you’d normally get from a novel like that. For at least two of the families in this neighborhood, however, nothing will be the same going forward. It’s classified as horror on the reading sites/apps but it’s moreso horror in the sense that really awful things happen at times…and there are ghosts. (For those familiar with the Ecuadorian literary powerhouse Maria Fernanda Ampuero, this novella’s ‘horror’ puts me in the mind of short story collections like Cockfight or Human Sacrifices.) There’s also a strong magical realism aspect here because we even get the pov of the titular serpent towards the end! How cool!

Anyway, The Summer of the Serpent often feels like a jigsaw puzzle in which certain bits of information don’t make sense or seem relevant until later on - and it’s not until the very end that we really grasp the full picture. Given the kind of story this is, it was a great storytelling decision to give us the pov of some of the children in the neighborhood as they helped to present the happenings in their own homes or in the street without the bias, guile, or obfuscation you get from adults - but also without understanding the significance or context of certain events. The children are very much clueless about the casual cruelty and violence that rears its head again and again.

The mention of current and geopolitical events definitely helped to cement the time period and the indignant pushing back on an American-centric existence was refreshing. I do have to say, though, that given the fact that so many characters were girls and women, I do think it was a missed opportunity, during the points where our narrator’s father imparts wisdom about the world, not to bring up the violent and generally stifling misogyny so many Mexican women and girls experience. But then again maybe that was intentional bc most men are either blind to or uncaring about such matters.

TL:DR? This was a short tale that wasted absolutely ZERO space and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks so much to NetGalley, Cecilia Eudave, and Highbridge Audio. The English translated version of this novel will be available on June 30th, 2026.

everything is beautiful and everything hurts