Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

I am open to book reviews from many sources.

• ABC Bookshelf ✅
• Booksellers ✅
• A select group of clients who talk books with me when I should be working ✅
• Cameron James on The Last Video Store podcast ❌…. ✅

Cam James was really into Monica. He talked about it for about 10 minutes. On a movie podcast. That’s just the power of great literature graphic novels.

Monica has nine chapters.

Each has its own distinctive style. So different are the settings of each chapter that initially I thought some chapters would be completely unrelated to each other. Pleasingly, however, all follow a common story.

The main character is, appropriately, Monica. Monica was born in the seventies from a deadbeat mum and a non-existent father. When she’s just a young’n she’s abandoned by her mother to live the rest of her childhood with grandparents, a couple of suburban squares. Monica’s whole identity is plagued by the uncertainty around who her parents are. Monica the graphic novel takes many tangents but always returns to this longing to find lost family and therein finally find belonging.

Monica’s whole early life is one big construction. She tells stories to herself about who her mother and father are, and why they left. All versions of these stories are sad. They involve a mother and father who do not know peace, and a child fallen by the wayside. No matter how Monica slices the fictions she creates from sparse information, one underlying truth always remains unobstructed: she is from a broken family.

I liked how unique each of the chapters felt. It made each time period in Monica’s life feel truly spaced out. Her time as a young child in the seventies is so different to her business success in her forties, which in turn is totally disparate in perspective to her quiet retirement era. Clowes manages to convey the ‘saga’-proportions of this woman’s life.

Except for the ending, which I disliked. Its shock quality cheapened the work put into the preceding chapters.

I’d bet my line of credit at Glebebooks that Alexi hasn’t read this yet, despite the CJ’s insistent urging. It’s one of those niche book recommendations that only a loser with too much free time and no current library blocks would pursue.