For Ecuador, I read Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, and oh my god, this book was so creepy!

Many, many people recommended this book for Ecuador. It was the overwhelming pick of the popular majority but it’s a horror book and I don’t do horror. Seriously. This scientific chart demonstrates where I land on he Tolerance for Horror Spectrum:

So although the description and recommendations for Jawbone were compelling, I really love sleeping at night, so I reluctantly ordered a different book for Ecuador.

Then I sent my newsletter and asked folks to send any recommendations they had for the E countries and Sarah Booker emailed back and said:

Love what you are doing! Might I humbly recommend Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda (in my translation) for Ecuador? And check out Melibea Obono Trifonia’s La bastarda (tr. Lawrence Schimel) for Equatorial Guinea. Happy reading!

Plenty of people ask me to read their book or their mom’s book or their friend’s brother’s book, and alas, there are just not enough hours in my lifetime to read everything that is recommended. As a lifelong people pleaser, I have had to train myself to resist my compulsion to read every suggested book, and by the time Sarah’s email arrived, I had the ability and backbone to say, Thanks, but no thanks! My intuition, however, decided it was time to ignore my placement on the Tolerance for Horror Spectrum and read Jawbone.

It turns out that while I may not have the stomach for Stephen King’s brand of horror, and I certainly cannot watch movies like Saw (unless I actually want to have insomnia for the rest of my life), I do enjoy Jawbone’s brand of horror, which I would describe as creepy and psychologically intense in the context of an all-girls high school. (Yes, my intuition is gloating.)

As I was reading this book, I often had to look up the meaning of words in English and as I did, I marveled at the work translators like Sarah Booker do. Seriously, translation is a sort of witchcraft. I’m fluent in English, but I do not by any stretch of the imagination know every single word in the English dictionary. Now, let’s say I am someday fluent in Portuguese–that doesn’t mean I will have mastered every single word in the Portuguese language. My god! If you consider the vastness of language, it is like contemplating infinity. Even if I am someday fluent in both English and Portuguese, I could be translating a text, encounter a Portuguese word that I do not know, and discover that the best translation for the Portuguese word is an English word I also do not know. Seriously, how do translators navigate these complexities and still pick the words and phrases that best capture an author’s energy???

And folks think that AI can translate.

But I digress! Jawbone has a feral energy that explores teenage anxiety and self-consciousness, and damn, it yanked me back into my own days as an awkward teen at an all-girls Catholic high school. And this feels weird to admit, but I enjoyed this experience, like a literary time-traveling back to the days of acne and bitchy girls in uniforms. (Hypothetical question: is this a red flag that I should mention to my therapist?)

The story is dense with quirky details that brought me into the setting, story, and lives of the girls. There is an intense mother-daughter obsession that makes Norman Bates look like a well-adjusted young man, and oh, just thinking about Jawbone months later makes me shudder but in a delightful way. Maybe I should be concerned, but sometimes, we need to plunge into the darkness to reckon with our humanity.