Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda Narrated by Victoria Villarreal

Overview

"Was desire something like being possessed by a nightmare?"



Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?



When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.



Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous "creepypastas," Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Jawbone

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize
A Ms. Magazine Favorite Book of 2022
A Words Without Borders Most Anticipated Book of 2022
A Latinx in Publishing Most Anticipated Book of 2022

“Expertly characterizing her protagonists while providing an engrossing, compelling story, Mónica Ojeda has hewn out her own version of contemporary gothic set in Ecuadorian culture.”—Judges’ Citation, 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature

“Strange, twisted . . . . [Ojeda's] language, like adolescence itself, is unruly and excessive, full of dramatic shifts and capable of both beauty and horror.” —Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

“Ojeda [draws] comparisons to Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allen Poe.” —The A.V. Club

“Jawbone depicts the process of becoming a woman as the ultimate horror story. . . . With terrifying ease, Ojeda illustrates how womanhood is characterized by dualities: fearful and feared, desired and desiring.” —Morgan Graham, Chicago Review of Books

“Rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves. . . . Ojeda is a strikingly singular voice, combining basic teen angst with stark madness and the power of teen girls to push back in a world that tries to make them powerless.” —Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

“Like the strange bloom of a corpse flower, the novel evokes life, death, and a vortex of twisted beauty.” —Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews starred review

“A wild, dirty, surreal, creepy narrative.” —Gabino Iglesias, Southwest Review

“Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” —Rose Bialer, Asymptote

“There’s very little that will be published this year, or any year, that will surpass this devastating novel.” —Ian Mond, Locus

“Ojeda deals with horror and desire like few others, with a beauty so extreme that it sometimes leaves you gasping. She scares me, and she amazes me, and I think she is one of the most important writers working in Spanish today.” —Mariana Enríquez

“As chilling as it is necessary, like all of Ojeda’s work.” —María Fernanda Ampuero

“Mónica Ojeda has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart.” —Andrés Barba

Kirkus Reviews

2021-11-30
Edgar Allan Poe meets a few of the mean girls.

A Catholic girls' high school for the daughters of elite Ecuadorians provides the seemingly innocuous setting for Ojeda’s meta treatment of the creepypasta phenomenon. Six school friends coalesce into something more resembling a cult under the influence of the charismatic—or just bossy?—Annelise. It is Fernanda who is the most intimately involved with Annelise’s increasingly surreal dares and challenges. Running on a collision course with the girls’ journey into the macabre is Miss Clara, the school’s anxiety-ridden new literature teacher. Miss Clara survived a lifetime of maternal domination only to have become, at a prior teaching position, the humiliated hostage of two girl students. Repeated references to teeth, jawbones, blood, and being devoured reinforce the menacing tone Ojeda sets from the opening scene of Miss Clara’s own abduction of Fernanda. Ojeda’s slow reveal of who did what to whom (and, maybe, why) follows a twisting course using transcripts of Fernanda’s dialogues with a therapist and passages which echo the increasing dissolution of Miss Clara’s already tenuous grip on composure. Mother-daughter relationships slide under Ojeda’s microscope, sharing space with the teacher-student dynamic and deities as objects in an exploration of power and sexuality during adolescence. Room is left for ambivalence about the true nature of horror; in a realistic change of pace, Ojeda’s monsters are, themselves, afraid of things. (The real monsters at work, though, are of a domestic kind.) An extensive translator’s note helps place the creepypasta genre in context in the literary landscape of terror, horror, and suspense and explains the stylistic language choices favored by Ojeda.

Every good horror story needs a victim; Ojeda’s monsters and victims wear the same faces.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175858151
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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