Potentially the most disturbing book I've read—not purely because of the content, but because it fully embraces the violence and obsession and sexual becoming of teenage girldom.
Jawbone is non-linear and told from multiple perspectives; the dense prose paired with creepypasta text, snippets of therapy sessions, and teenage girl slang. Incredible language in an incredible translation from Sarah Booker.
The story follows wealthy, privileged girls in a private, bilingual girls' highschool in Ecuador as they create a cult and challenge each other to increasingly dangerous and transgressive stunts. Our primary characters are Anneliese, the ringleader & inventor of the White God, her best friend Fernanda, and their new English teacher Clara, who is terrified of her students and obsessed with her dead mother. It catalogs Annaliese & Fernanda's obsessively close relationship and repressed lesbian identities as their frienship tips into enmity and puts them on a collision course with Clara.
It's about daughters' consumption of their mothers, it's about devotion and obsession, and most of all it's about the bubble of horror that is adolescence.
Check the trigger warnings, holy shit.
