- a spider weaves, weaves
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- #3 — a spider weaves, weaves
Hello, and welcome back.
Here’s a quick e-mail, mostly to congratulate this year’s Hugo, Nebula and BSFA finalists 💕💕! I was excited to see many familiar names, including Dante Luiz for Best Fan Artist, Renan Bernardo for his magical realism novelette A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A CONSCIOUS CHAIR, and Jana Bianchi’s translated short story VANISHING TRACKS IN THE SAND. I haven’t been able to catch up with everything that was published since 2022 because I’m still recovering, but I’m particularly excited to read THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera (whose newsletter you should also subscribe to, by the way, if you don’t already).
My novella BUT NOT TOO BOLD has been moved to February 2025, but you can already add it to Goodreads or pre-order it. More on that soon!
See you next month!
Hache 🕷️
Jawbone 🇪🇨 Mandíbula
(Mónica Ojeda, 2018, trans. Sarah Booker)
Jawbone greets us with two main timelines, both of them unsettling. In one, Fernanda, a student at an all-girls high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador, wakes up in an abandoned cabin, kept hostage by her teacher, Miss Clara. In the other, we meet the main characters in the recent past and try to understand what led us to this moment. There’s Fernanda and her clique of wealthy teenage girls from prominent families, bound together by their love of the grotesque and their increasingly dangerous and ritualistic games; Annelise, with whom Fernanda shares an obsessive, psychosexual and risky friendship; and Clara herself, who is returning to work after a traumatic incident in her last school, carrying with herself her deceased mother.
Just like Bad Girls, I didn’t have the chance of reading the English translation, but Mónica Ojeda does a great job portraying disquieting relationships, the conflicting and fucked up sides of adolescence, power dynamics and obsession, and I definitely look forward to her other books.