Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda
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Blurred View by Big Thief
Jawbone follows a group of fifteen-year-old girls in Ecuador as they worship gods, complete strange, dangerous tasks, and grow up.
On transitory places & being a fifteen-year-old girl
Within the first few pages, Jawbone captures so achingly what it is to be a fifteen-year-old girl in a way that no book I’ve ever read has. Fernanda, Annalise and their friends inhabit this abandoned house in the woods and it becomes a vessel for their needs, their fears, their childlike tendencies, their metamorphosis, and so on and so forth.
I was genuinely taken aback at how sharply Ojeda writes teenage girls and how she manages to imbue the not-so-dead-but-pretending-it-is abstract magic of childhood and the ephemeral place that all fifteen-year-old girls inhabited at one point that seems to transcend the boundaries of the world, not in an overt way, but in a way that makes it hard to realize the sun went down already, in a way that marks that place in your memory of the rest of your life.
For the girls in the book, it is an abandoned house, for me it was a desolate construction site filled with these massive styrofoam blocks—that I assume now were merely trash but at the time seemed like something important—that we used to climb up and jump from, skinning knees and drawing blood, paddling them over the muddy water below and inevitably falling in. Do you have it in your head, your place? It is such a distinct mark, in my memories, at least. I’ve never read anything that has captured what the passage of time feels like when filtered through a childhood bliss tinged with some sort of danger, with the possibility of getting caught. I’ve never read anything that accurately describes the feeling of teetering on the edge of growing up, of having your existence so directly tied to a place, of existing in relation to other teenage girls and their whims.
There is such a fervent intensity in Fernanda and Annalise’s friendship; it borders on too much the entire book. It is like watching a taut string on the verge of snapping. It’s all about indulgence, fear as a pacifier, taking roiling desire out on something in your vicinity. They are both fascinating characters, to say the least. Ojeda asks us who is responsible for what happened and lets us scream our throats raw about it with no answer and it is brilliantly done.
The horror, the writing, & general thoughts
The writing is dense and wonderfully weaved together; no word is wasted and the descriptions Ojeda paints are vivid and imbued with such a piercing sense of tension and dread. She employs contrasting sentences, one of dialogue and one of prose, and instead of it being disjointed it adds verve and feeds into the atmosphere. I could truly go on about her writing forever.
Ojeda paints adolescence like an open wound and it is so apt. It’s such a fragile, tender, in-between, bloody, inside-out time and there is so much unseen horror in becoming, in being on the precipice of becoming. Speaking of the horror in Jawbone, it’s exceptional. It’s not necessarily evident, but the little details are fraught with horror—and do I ever love a book that can achieve this level of eeriness without apparent, in-your-face shocking scenes. The horror is desire, the horror is a teenage girl, the horror is the need, the horror is a line that is bound to be crossed, the horror is growing up.
This book is like the inside of a teenage girl's subconscious, crawling with all sorts of soft and rotten things. This book is a manifestation of all those strange, am-I-psychopathic-or-just-fifteen thoughts you’ve ever had. This book is like picking a scab, slowly, and watching blood swell around it. This book is everything I wanted out of Bunny and then some.
Jawbone is one of the best horror books I have read in a long time. There is no other book like it and I’d highly recommend it if you like weird horror. And
, I owe you my life for this recommendation!!In conclusion: I love weird books about girlhood! Go read Jawbone!
This song, to me, is about desperation. Like Jawbone, it has sexual overtones, and is an exploration of need.
The repeated but altered lyrics at the end of each verse read like giving yourself up to something:
I burn for you, burn for you / Return to you, turn to you / I run for you, run for you / I'll feed for you, feed for you
I’d imagine these words between Fernanda and Annalise, somewhere between being as close to another person as one can be and becoming them, somewhere between friends and hidden desire.
While the earth rolls, bleeding from its axis
This line fits exceptionally well with the ‘white age’ and' ‘white god’ mythological aspect of Jawbone, which is essentially the drag queen god that the girls worship and the ‘new age’ they will usher in. The line emits the same sort of cosmic alteration of the state of the world in subtle ways.
Blurred View as a whole feels like being emerged in something that’s bordering on the edge of dangerous, and that is precisely how Jawbone reads.
That’s all for now, take care of yourself!
Ooooh Jawbone sounds great!! Adding to the Goodreads list!
I inhaled this book last night and I loved it! Thanks so much! I definitely needed the escape, even though it was very creepy.