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95th out of 285 books
—
20 voters
Mountains of the Moon
by
I.J. Kay
A highly original novel about a young woman’s journey from shattered youth to self-discovery
After ten years in a London prison, Louise Adler (Lulu) is released with only a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets: a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents, followed by a reckless adolescence. Fr...more
After ten years in a London prison, Louise Adler (Lulu) is released with only a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets: a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents, followed by a reckless adolescence. Fr...more
Hardcover, 368 pages
Published
July 5th 2012
by Viking Adult
(first published February 2nd 2012)
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Quite a blistering and intense first novel about a girl growing up in some pretty awful circumstances.
This is not, as some other reviewers point out, a straightforward read. There's a lot of shifting about on a timeline and there are characters you try to understand who might just disappear for a hundred and fifty pages.
But the prose is clear and playful, characters vivid. To enjoy this book you have to be patient as the jigsaw pieces fall into place. I felt it all worked well.
I was impressed...more
This is not, as some other reviewers point out, a straightforward read. There's a lot of shifting about on a timeline and there are characters you try to understand who might just disappear for a hundred and fifty pages.
But the prose is clear and playful, characters vivid. To enjoy this book you have to be patient as the jigsaw pieces fall into place. I felt it all worked well.
I was impressed...more
Our heroine is a complex creature who tells her story in two voices: as a poor, uneducated and brutalized child and as a hard-as-nails woman who served a decade in prison for murder. Mountains of the Moon refers to a mountain range in Africa. As a child our heroine Lulu would pretend she was prowling the Masai Mara, spear in hand, lions hunting her. She dreamed of becoming a Masai warrior. It makes sense: she is very tall and has always had to fight.She would escape to Africa when she was physic...more
With a playful pen name like I.J. Kay, how could I resist? Even though this is a dark tale of a troubled young girl, the author's quick wit and sense of humor still shines through. It had me hick-sick (as Lulu would say) in parts, but mostly I was amused with Lulu's cleverness. Mountains of the Moon is absolutely refreshing in its originality.
Please be patient while reading this book because it will reward you for your perseverance. It seems a lot of people have found this book too confusing to...more
Please be patient while reading this book because it will reward you for your perseverance. It seems a lot of people have found this book too confusing to...more
Someone has to keep the spirit of Billy Faulkner alive. Might as well be an English woman writing under a pseudonym.
Trying to write what a "what is this book about?" synopsis is pretty much pointless. Suffice to say it's a book about a woman who very slowly develops the ability to communicate with the world. Because her mother neglects her and her father threatens to kill her and she's responsible for raising her baby brother and her grandparents love her but her mom won't let them near her.
Hal...more
Trying to write what a "what is this book about?" synopsis is pretty much pointless. Suffice to say it's a book about a woman who very slowly develops the ability to communicate with the world. Because her mother neglects her and her father threatens to kill her and she's responsible for raising her baby brother and her grandparents love her but her mom won't let them near her.
Hal...more
This book begins about 85% of the way through the tale, and it is told in a non-linear fashion. But I say chronology is for suckers. Each and every section in this book is solid story telling. I didn't worry about fully understanding the big picture because I realized that, as is the case with all great reads, eventually, all would become clear.
What is this story about? I suppose it's the life of Lulu. A very non-traditional life on the outside, lived by a girl with a wonderful imagination and a...more
What is this story about? I suppose it's the life of Lulu. A very non-traditional life on the outside, lived by a girl with a wonderful imagination and a...more
I won the book Mountains of the Moon by I. J. Kay from GoodReads First Reads (along with another, which I'm reading now!) and I was really excited to read it. Sounds pretty intense and interesting, right? I was so wrong...
I don't want to say it was "terrible" because it wasn't atrocious. However, I did not enjoy this book much at all. The hallucinatory and fractured way in which the story is told is so complex and multilayered that even when paying attention, it's nearly impossible to follow. Ad...more
I don't want to say it was "terrible" because it wasn't atrocious. However, I did not enjoy this book much at all. The hallucinatory and fractured way in which the story is told is so complex and multilayered that even when paying attention, it's nearly impossible to follow. Ad...more
When I first began the book, "Mountains of the Moon", I was a little confused with the who and what. However, reading through the rough life story of a girl with many names became very intriguing and suspenseful. As most Suspense Novels, the suspense carried into the clarity of the point. The author " I.J.Kay", did an excellent job portraying the imagination of Lulu as a child, alongside showing the life she was living as an adult under alias'. This imagination was construed due to the traumatic...more
Feb 27, 2013
Linda
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Bill at Longfellow's Books
Recommended to Linda by:
Junot Diaz mentioned in an interview in NY Times
Shelves:
contemporary-fiction
This is an amazing book. The main character and narrator - it is not clear what her real name is as she uses a host of names -- is fascinating. There is a linear story riddled with flashbacks that are not. By the time she is thirty, Catherine (or Lulu or Midget or Louise or Kim or whatever other name she picks) has experienced more abuse and adversity than most of us could ever imagine. She is a survivor and resiliant, managing to stay alive in situations perhaps even uglier than those the Girl...more
I absolutely LOVED this book. I kept finding myself holding my breath as one heartbreakingly tragic episode in the central character's life followed another. The constant sliding to and from different time frames in 'Catherine's' life kept me engaged - I really enjoyed the challenge of building the separate pieces of her story and moving them closer and closer together. I only had the whole picture right at the very end. Some readers seem to have found that irritating but to me it made the story...more
I won a copy of Mountains of the Moon by I. J. Kaye through the Goodreads Giveaway Contest.
This was not an easy read.Flashbacks, multiple characters and fragments of difficult life.
Louise Adler (Lulu) is released after ten years in a London prison,with a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets.She lived a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents, followed by a reckless adolescence. Lulu has spent her youth in an atm...more
This was not an easy read.Flashbacks, multiple characters and fragments of difficult life.
Louise Adler (Lulu) is released after ten years in a London prison,with a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets.She lived a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents, followed by a reckless adolescence. Lulu has spent her youth in an atm...more
I found this book very confusing and after reading it, I still don't really know the story. The jumping back and forth in time and place, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, made it impossible to follow. And, what WAS the main character's name, for gods sake? Louise? Lulu? Catherine? Kim? I didn't understand any of it and could not discern any explanation for anything that happened. What did happen? Was she at one point locked up in a basement by the "Sandwich Man"? Did she murder multiple pe...more
Some books weave in and out of a story in such a way that I'm not quite sure what's real and what's not. This is especially true in this book, where the main character, a woman with many aliases, has been in prison, and, newly-released, attempts to make sense of her fragmented and often sordid life. Although the story was interesting, I wasn't always sure how things connected together -- and perhaps, that's the issue for the main character as well.
Won this off Goodreads. Fractured, layered, at times complex but for me mostly boring. I am not convinced this was my cup of tea but may re-read at a later date. I love authors like Virginia Woolf with the stream of consciousness novels that made her famous. However, for me, this first novel had me scratching my head at times and wondering do I really care about the central character? Still, grateful I had the chance to read this.
This story is disjointed alternating between childhood, growing-uphood and adulthood in no particular sequence and that's the beauty of it. Women married to abusive men sometimes sacrifice their children for the sake of the man, this is the account of one such. A brutalized child who becomes a survivor and you do want her to be successful, successful in this case means being alive at the end, nothing more.
I found Lulu's story very tragic and harsh, but I felt compelled to read about her. She was quite a unique character...but I didn't like or understand her at first. Once I got to the last third of the book things started to make a lot more sense to me, and I noticed my opinion of her had changed quite a bit. She had such a hard life with some horrible experiences and I think that she coped the best way that she knew how to.
The only downsides that I felt this book had was that it could be hard to...more
The only downsides that I felt this book had was that it could be hard to...more
This is a pretty big book, for me, and I read it in a few days. I was pulled in from the first paragraph; What would happen next? I love stories that I can't predict and this one had that quality on every page.
I wish that there had been more explaination or clue-ish details; I couldn't figure it all out for each personality or story twist.
Nice writing though. I liked the characters and how her life went on. She was a survivor.
free book
I wish that there had been more explaination or clue-ish details; I couldn't figure it all out for each personality or story twist.
Nice writing though. I liked the characters and how her life went on. She was a survivor.
free book
This book was really hard for me to follow. I often found myself reading a page and having to go back and read it again because it felt like I missed something. I really wanted to like this book but it felt like it was too much of an effort to get through.
Every time I picked up this book, I felt like I was inside the skin of the protagonist. When I finished, it was as if I had lived her life and it took some time to re-acclimate to my own life. I wish this book had been longer.
I won a copy of Mountains of the Moon by I. J. Kaye through the Goodreads First Read giveaway.
Mountains of the Moon is a very gritty look at a child named Lulu and her very dysfunctional life. She copes with her life and the tragedies surrounding it by escaping to Africa thru a picture book first given to her by a member of her family. The storyline is very confusing because it skips back and forth from childhood to adulthood and back. You may meet one character and then have to wait 100 pages f...more
Mountains of the Moon is a very gritty look at a child named Lulu and her very dysfunctional life. She copes with her life and the tragedies surrounding it by escaping to Africa thru a picture book first given to her by a member of her family. The storyline is very confusing because it skips back and forth from childhood to adulthood and back. You may meet one character and then have to wait 100 pages f...more
I could not even get halfway thru this book. I cannot stand to read books with slangy grammatical garbage like "I ain't skeered." I wanted to like this book, but couldn't force myself to even finish it.
Gripping! Intense! It is a challenge to read, but just dive in and let the language splash over you!! Well worth the effort to keep track of characters and plot! READ IT!!
The narrator's voice was definitely one-of-a-kind...to the point that I couldn't even comprehend some of the major plot points. But all in all, I couldn't put it down.
Beautiful and mesmerising, but also extremely brutal/realistic portrayals of a fractured and damaged childhood. A very difficult read in this regard.
Overly ambitious, sometimes a mess, but some excellent writing in here by a, presumably, first time author (no biographical info on the cover for I.J.Kay...)
I wrote a very lengthy review that got swallowed by cyberspace. Sigh. I don't have the energy to reproduce it! Read this book, read this book, READ THIS BOOK! (One of the best this year!)
I could not get into this book, and I am sorry to have to say that cause I really like to read. I tried though and could not get past page 25.
Even though I read every word, I’m not quite sure I got all of Mountains of the Moon or even understood most of what was thrown at me. But it was very poetic and at times much like being an outsider watching/listening in on a conversation. A very unique story twisting between what seems like reality, memories and imagination coming to a resolution fitting for this very challenging character and the reader. I did like this complex storytelling, I’m just not sure I’d be up for a similar challenge...more
I was lucky enough to win this novel through Goodreads First Reads! I must admit, this novel was intense and difficult to read. There was an abundance of characters and it was difficult for me to keep up. However, the emotions and the intelligence behind the plot were there. It's about a woman trying to deal with the misfortunes she's encountered throughout her lifetime, so the complexity just drove the story forward.
I loved this book. I loved the characters and the style in which it was written.
This is a disjointed and very difficult novel to read. But if you put enough time and energy into this book, ultimately, it will be very fulfilling.
I couldn't even begin to write a plot summary for this book.
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I.J.Kay was born in Suffolk in 1961. She lives in Bristol and in The Gambia, West Africa, but favours a boat on which she writes and travels the waterways of England. In 2006 she took an MA (Creative Writing) with distinction from Bath Spa University. "Mountains of the Moon" is her debut novel.
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Feb 09, 2013 02:45pm