What Is The Plot Of Jawbone By Mónica Ojeda?

Question

Finding this novel unnerving but hard to pin down. What makes the elite boarding school setting and the friendships there so particularly horrifying and atmospheric?

ricky918 · Answer

Similar elements of dark academia and an obsessive, detrerious friendship between two girls are explored in ‘Jawbone’, which follows their descent into psychological horror at a strange boarding school in Ecuador after they are influenced by their sinister literature teacher. Like this weird and disturbing narrative, The Remorse Deep in the Bones explores the long-drawn-out physical and psychological torture of guilt in a person haunted by a terrible act of betrayal long past and who is forced to come to terms with it in a grueling confrontation with the emotional and supernatural manifestations of it.

Xander · Answer

‘Jawbone’ by Mónica Ojeda is such a trip in a bad way. I mean, it’s good. This story about two girls and the terrible way their friendship can go follows Fernanda, a slightly unhinged protagonist, as she becomes increasingly fixated on her classmate Annelise. Set in a creepy and Hellish boarding school, Fernanda’s struggle with identity and her usual-brand-of terrible is aided by Ojeda’s beautiful writing that’s simultaneously ferocious. There’s tons of body horror – teeth, flesh, rot – but rather than be vomit-inducing in a super-gross-way, it serves to illustrate the psychological deterioration of the two girls.

I also really appreciated the way that the narrative structure matched up with the instability of the characters. The story jumped back and forth between different perspectives and formats and it was really hard to tell what was real. It was kind of disorienting but I felt like I was reading the story alongside Fernanda as she went down her rabbit hole. It wasn’t a super satisfying ending but it was really good in an ambiguous sort of way. I would recommend ‘Jawbone’ to people who like books that are kind of hard to read and really stay with you for a long time (even if they kind of haunt your nightmares).

Knox · Answer

'Jawbone' is one of those rare books that gets under your skin and stays there. Author Mónica Ojeda constructs a dark and often painful story around the complicated friendship of Fernanda and Annelise, with their toxic dynamic serving as a lens through which we explore topics of fear, desire and pain. The story takes place at a boarding school, which is a sort of third personality in the novel, often claustrophobic and increasingly surreal as the plot unfolds. And the fairy tale quality of the novel’s many images – including the title jawbone – lends the horror a mythic dimension that is both deeply unsettling and frequently beautiful. For fans of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado, this is a real page-turner – and one that will stay with you long after you finish reading it.

Bianca · Answer

“Jawbone” by Valeria Ortiz Ojeda is a monstrous, twisted, and profoundly unsettling novel about the friendship between two teenage girls, Fernanda and Annelise, who attend a fashionable boarding school in Ecuador. It’s written as a kind of documentary – a novel composed of diary entries, interviews, and fragmented narratives which slowly, painfully add up to a nightmarish whole. Ojeda explores the weird and twisted dynamic of Fernanda’s obsession with her classmate, examining it through the lens of teenage uneasiness and awkward, besieged adolescence. It is simultaneously repulsive and fascinating.

One of the things that lingered with me after I finished reading the book is how Ojeda blurred reality with hallucinations. As Fernanda became more and more obsessed with Annelise, their relationship became almost mythic. And teeth, literal teeth, kept popping up in strange ways throughout the story. The atmosphere was claustrophobic and it felt like the walls were closing in on the girls at [Santa Marta’s boarding school]. It was very intense and the ending was both shocking and completely anticipated. Dark, literary, female-focused horror fans should totally read this. Just read it during the day, alone in a public place or something.

Mariecar Trangia · Answer

The greatest strength of the story is its restraint. This could so easily have become a “Oh, yeah! As a kid, I found a fearsome-looking jawbone!” type of plot, but Ojeda resists this and leaves the maximum amount of ambiguity about this event and its relevance to the rest of the story. Rather than presenting the dangers on the retreat in a clear and straightforward manner, the author presents the many facets of uncertainty that they expose. That is to say that the story is horror about uncertainty. It’s about the fear that one is losing his mind. It’s about the fear that one cannot trust the person with whom one is closest. It’s about the fear that one does not truly know the authority figure to whom one looks for guidance and comfort. The story is to explore these fears rather than to reveal a logical solution to a puzzle. And the jawbone, which could have become so much of a symbol, remains a kind of strange, ambiguous object, its animal or human origin a mystery, and the story it tells one that is not clearly defined. In fact, the story itself is not the story of how one solves a mystery and finds walls closing in around one. Rather, it is the experience of being trapped inside such a story.

Nolram Nolram · Answer

A mystery or creature feature this is not. Most of the book is spent slowly, intricately and heavily building the incredibly weird world of this very specific school and these very specific girls. We experience their griping discomfort and obsessing over dead or rotting bodies as well as their uneasy, confusing feelings for their teacher. Their often-traumatized childhoods are slowly pieced together by the reader in similar fashion to how they were pieced together by the girls themselves (or at least that is how it seems to the reader). The Retreat portion of the book is the most suspenseful part and even that is multi-faceted – is it just the storm? The girls’ dwindling supply of food? The teacher’s total collapse? Or possibly even the girls’ collective psychosis? The lines are at every single point continually blurred and it is up to the reader to try to sort through it all and discover what is real and what is merely part of the collective nightmares of these damaged little girls. A plot that is mostly cleared up on the pages of the book takes place almost entirely in the reader’s own mind as they struggle to piece together the evidence left behind.

Joan Procia Asider · Answer

Ugh, this book would be really mis-leading to people who think it is just another YA school-set thriller. It would be such a brutal read for someone expecting that. Reading this summary makes me want to go read the book and then sit on a wall for 20 minutes staring after finishing it.

Hansel Mae Bajilidad · Answer

This is a novel that inhabits the no man’s land between reality and nightmare. On the surface the plot follows the dire goings-on of an illicit teacher-students relationship and the subsequent horrible events of a disastrous class trip to a cabin. But within this simple framework we are rigorously and in intimate detail shuttled back and forth within the cramped lives of thisTeacher and his/her three students, their repulsions made manifest in corporeal revolt, their single-minded aesthetic fixation with rotting, decaying matter that sinks deep into their miserable souls. The “MacGuffin”, the teacher’s stolen jawbone, is largely insignificant as an actual object. It’s an idea – hard, true and terrible – that’s been buried and the novel unfolds as the mounting pressure is slowly released on these individuals trapped in this wretched school and then its isolated, dank and fearful alternative in the cabin at the back of the trees. In each case a pressure cooker of rules/tension and of extreme scarcity/fear. When it finally does go bang, it’s a grimy, brutal and morally complex event. Not a simple or uplifting release from tension. Rather it is a relentless and oft-disturbing exploration of human emotions and psychological reactions, played out in a predominantly linear and plot driven narrative.

Rhea Mae Mundo · Answer

It’s kind of hard to explain a plot for a nightmare you had. The novel is set at a really strict school and follows a group of teens, mostly teenage girls, with a special focus on two of them. They’re both huge fans of their literature teacher, who doesn’t just teach them novels. Instead, she sort of chooses which fears to highlight for them and then encourages them to write some pretty dark stuff. For the majority of the novel, you’re getting a sense of the high school they attend and the sort of really intense, super-undeveloped relationship that this teacher has with these two girls in particular who are the focus. They go on a little retreat in the woods where a huge storm hits, and that sort of amplifies the sense of psychological panic that’s been building. As the girls try to make sense of what’s happening, they realize that their collective sort-of-acknowledged mythology about this sort of creature in the woods called the “Coco” is sort of becoming real. But is it? Or is it just a product of their hunger and fear? The plot is really designed to keep you guessing and sort of unsure of what’s real and what’s not. It’s really about the way that a story, be it novel or movie or even oral myth, can become a sort of physical manifestation of fear for someone, and how it can even become a monster that consumes them. It’s a really intense novel that explores how the stories that we read can affect us in deep and sort-of-negative ways when we’re under duress.

Tootsie Dumanon Acierda · Answer

This is a horror of intimacy story. It explores how closeness becomes suffocation, how secrets shared become weapons. The central fascination of teacher Clara and her two young students is that of possessive, creative and very unhealthy intimacy. They are lost in their stories, in their make-believe world that is at once refuge and prison. The original sin of their friendship, the first secret they share, is their childhood trauma. The novel follows their friendship throughout the years. The only time they ever return to this set-up is for a retreat. But this is when their intimate world is put under stress and breaks apart. Their isolation makes them even more sensitive to every slight, every unspoken resentment. And the question of the novel is: who will break first? Will it be a surrender to madness or a violent act? The external storm mirrors their internal chaos. It’s not so much a sequence of events but rather the watching of a very beautifully crafted snow globe of dysfunctional people getting shaken to pieces.

Angie Robles · Answer

I just finished reading this a week or so ago and it’s really been percolating for me. This is a deeply unsettling novel that follows the stories of two teenage girls, Fernanda and Annelise, who are at a very oppressive Catholic school. Their teacher, Miss Clara, develops this very intimate and very destructive relationship with them, delving deep into their worst anxieties and obsessions. The story is told more or less chronologically, but also jumps back and forth in time between the girls’ current life at school, their joint obsessive consumption of horror stories online and off, and a traumatic event from their childhood involving a so-called “monster”. The actual plot of the novel centers around a school trip to a remote cabin for a weekend of fun, which rapidly descends into a weird, nightmarish, physical and psychological fight for survival, as old repressed traumas and monstrous folklore are unleashed in the most terrible and fear-inducing way. It’s a story about the contagion of fear: how it’s passed from teacher to student, from story to reality. And it’s not a neatly resolved thriller-type story, but rather a very difficult and very bodily and visceral exploration of becoming. The book ends on a note of even greater horror and uncertainty than before, which I think is pretty perfect for the themes explored here.

What Is The Plot Of Jawbone By Mónica Ojeda?

11 Answers

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