An English Language Debut That Translates the Violence Beneath a Neighborhood

Set during a sweltering summer in 1977 Guadalajara, a serpent girl weeps in a carnival glass box. A neighbor’s dog is dangled repeatedly from a tree. A ghost sits on a bed in a sinister house, returning night after night. Cecilia Eudave’s The Summer of the Serpent moves among six narrators—children and adults who witness the same events but understand them differently. Violence circulates through families and neighborhoods long before anyone can fully name what is happening, and no one character sees the whole story. The result is a novel less interested in recovering a definitive version of the past than in examining how people construct meaning from partial knowledge.

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