Jawbone
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature!
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ecuadorian writer Ojeda's delectable English-language debut, two classmates bond at an all-girls' Catholic high school over a made-up mythology. The ever-inventive Annelise designs a deity ("a rhinestone-encrusted firefly") to entertain her group of friends, among them Fernanda. The two become inseparable and then fall dangerously in love, as Ojeda plays with the narrative device of the double—one of several tropes from the "creepypastas" of internet-horror culture. Their literature teacher, Clara Lopez Valverde, embodies her own horror story: she's haunted by the ghost of her mother and descends into madness. A lifelong sufferer of an extreme anxiety disorder—"a panic attack is like waking up burning in water, falling upward, freezing in a fire, walking against yourself, your flesh solid and your bones liquid"—Clara will end up kidnapping one of her students for her own occult reason. There are echoes of Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson at play, but the vision is ultimately Ojeda's own—delicious in how it seduces and disturbs the reader as the girls rely on horror both as entertainment and as a way of staving off the actual terrors of growing up. This is creepy good fun.
