A review by abbie_
Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda

challenging dark slow-paced

4.0

When I tell you this book sent me spinning off into an existential crisis… Completely disturbing, unsettling, beautifully written, Jawbone is a delightful mash up of literary and body horror, putting the horror of puberty front and centre. The teenage girls in this novel are legit terrifying, but so is everything else - Miss Clara’s obsession with becoming her dead mother, Fernanda’s kidnapping, the White God theory… every chapter drips with atmosphere. I loved the way Ojeda would include two completely different narratives almost simultaneously. There’d be one sentence from one narrative, then one from the other, then back and forth until the crescendo. The result is a feverish, delirious reading experience.

There’s a part written as a letter from Annelise to Miss Clara where she compares humans to ants - we are to the cosmic terrors of the universe what ants are to us. I took a photo of that passage and sent it to three different people just so I wasn’t alone in my existential dread 🫠

The translator’s note at the beginning (!!) from Sarah Booker was also super interesting, I can only imagine how challenging it must have been to translate a novel like this one!
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