The Summer of the Serpent - by Cecilia Eudave Hardcover

About the Book

"A kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of a sweltering Guadalajara summer. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half-oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on. Told in colliding voices - children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible - The Summer of the Serpent is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood. Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode - and how those memories can coil through a lifetime"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of a sweltering Guadalajara summer

Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half-oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on.

Told in colliding voices--children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible--The Summer of the Serpent is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood.

Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode--and how those memories can coil through a lifetime.

Review Quotes

Praise for Summer of the Serpent

"A voice that knows how to narrate, from a place of tenderness, humor, and amazement, the wonderful absurdity of being alive."
--Patricia Esteban Erlés, author of Las Madres Negras

"Eudave weaves her ars poetica from threads of wonder and the uncanny, where the marvelous appears in every action of the protagonists, alongside chance and the inexorable verdict of a labyrinthine past and future--filled with secrets that demand to be revealed and destinies that must be fulfilled."
--Alberto González, Nexos

About the Author

Cecilia Eudave lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara. She is the author of the story collections Técnicamente humanos, En primera persona, and Registro de imposibles, as well as the novel Bestiaria vida, which won the Juan García Ponce Literary Award.

Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling, Andrés Neuman's Bariloche, Isabel Zapata's In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón's The Brush, and (with Sarah Booker) Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me.