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goaskellice 's review for:
Jawbone
by Mónica Ojeda
Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda is the one book that has been most commonly recommended to me to read and I am… confused?
Our story opens with one girl, of a large group of friends, who has been kidnapped and the rest of the story follows the events that have led up to this moment, essentially.
Right off the bat, I could’ve done without the kidnapping storyline. I even think that we could have done away with Miss Clara (the teacher) as a character altogether as I think she brought nothing. I didn’t find her character interesting to read from, I didn’t care for her obsessive relationship with her mother; I feel like that is all something that has been done before countless times. We’ve all seen Psycho: the mother-obsessed trope kind of just feels overdone at this point.
This book is weird, it’s provocative, it pushes boundaries. To an extent: I like that. I liked the complicated emotions the girls felt for each other, and the feelings they had towards themselves as teenage girls edging towards womanhood. There just comes a point when the book just tried too hard to shock, added too many edge-lordy Reddit stories, dropped too many cliché references.
Jawbone contains a lot of commentary on girlhood, puberty, sexuality, obsession, religion, social media, mental illness, etc. Does it try to do a little too much? Perhaps. It’s an ambitious novel, it reaches to do something out-there, something different. We have therapy session excerpts scattered throughout, a non-linear timeline, multiple character experiences. There’s just a lot.
It feels almost wrong to critique the writing of a translated work, however there was so much repetition in here, of words and whole phrases that I started to question if this was an attempt at humour, done intentionally or if there just wasn’t more than one word in translation to use. I found also, potentially because of this, some of the vocabulary used by these teenage girls just wasn’t believable. Their syntax, concepts, terminology just seemed so far advanced for that of a teenage girl that I almost had to suspend belief.
So, what did I actually like? Jawbone is suspenseful, I read a 300 page book in less than 3 days; something must have kept me going here. There’s excellent use of foreshadowing throughout and we know that something big is coming, did that ‘something’ live up to my expectations? I’m not too sure about that one. I loved the complex relationship the two main protagonists, Fernanda and Annelise, had with one another. The complexity of female friendships, their murky sense of right and wrong, their exploration of themselves and each other. This is was done in such an unflinching and confronting way, in that Latin American style way of writing that I absolutely love. If this book explored only that female friendship I would have scored a lot higher.
Overall, I’m glad I read Jawbone, I’m upset that my expectations weren’t met given the sheer amount of times it has been recommended to me; however I can certainly say I am relieved now to have finally read this book. I’m really, really interested to have an open discussion about this book so please feel free to tell me I’m an idiot who completely missed the mark with this review? 3/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Our story opens with one girl, of a large group of friends, who has been kidnapped and the rest of the story follows the events that have led up to this moment, essentially.
Right off the bat, I could’ve done without the kidnapping storyline. I even think that we could have done away with Miss Clara (the teacher) as a character altogether as I think she brought nothing. I didn’t find her character interesting to read from, I didn’t care for her obsessive relationship with her mother; I feel like that is all something that has been done before countless times. We’ve all seen Psycho: the mother-obsessed trope kind of just feels overdone at this point.
This book is weird, it’s provocative, it pushes boundaries. To an extent: I like that. I liked the complicated emotions the girls felt for each other, and the feelings they had towards themselves as teenage girls edging towards womanhood. There just comes a point when the book just tried too hard to shock, added too many edge-lordy Reddit stories, dropped too many cliché references.
Jawbone contains a lot of commentary on girlhood, puberty, sexuality, obsession, religion, social media, mental illness, etc. Does it try to do a little too much? Perhaps. It’s an ambitious novel, it reaches to do something out-there, something different. We have therapy session excerpts scattered throughout, a non-linear timeline, multiple character experiences. There’s just a lot.
It feels almost wrong to critique the writing of a translated work, however there was so much repetition in here, of words and whole phrases that I started to question if this was an attempt at humour, done intentionally or if there just wasn’t more than one word in translation to use. I found also, potentially because of this, some of the vocabulary used by these teenage girls just wasn’t believable. Their syntax, concepts, terminology just seemed so far advanced for that of a teenage girl that I almost had to suspend belief.
So, what did I actually like? Jawbone is suspenseful, I read a 300 page book in less than 3 days; something must have kept me going here. There’s excellent use of foreshadowing throughout and we know that something big is coming, did that ‘something’ live up to my expectations? I’m not too sure about that one. I loved the complex relationship the two main protagonists, Fernanda and Annelise, had with one another. The complexity of female friendships, their murky sense of right and wrong, their exploration of themselves and each other. This is was done in such an unflinching and confronting way, in that Latin American style way of writing that I absolutely love. If this book explored only that female friendship I would have scored a lot higher.
Overall, I’m glad I read Jawbone, I’m upset that my expectations weren’t met given the sheer amount of times it has been recommended to me; however I can certainly say I am relieved now to have finally read this book. I’m really, really interested to have an open discussion about this book so please feel free to tell me I’m an idiot who completely missed the mark with this review? 3/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️