The Mountain Lion

By: Jean Stafford

Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers

Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Eight-year-old Molly and her 10-year-old brother, Ralph, are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself.

One summer, they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to back-country Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world - savage, direct, beautiful, untamed - to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.

©1947, 1972 by Jean Stafford (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

a heartbreaking coming of age story

After reading Stafford's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories I went straight to my library's website and checked out the audiobook of this novel mainly because I live in a small town in the Colorado mountains and do not find many books that remind me of home. I see this one labeled a coming of age story often, but nobody comes of age so I believe that is wrong. This is a very adult book about children and the difficulties of childhood.

The Mountain Lion tells the story of a brother and sister over two years of their lives, ages 8 to 10 and 14 to 16. Stafford allows them to be fully fledged children and teens, who act with impulsivity, react with anger and show all the awkwardness of life at those ages. Often authors make children appear too young or too old, but Stafford wrote them with loving attention and detail. She seemed to be very in touch with how the young think and feel.

Ralph and Molly begin the book as the best of friends. They loved doing everything together and I actually found their relationship a bit too perfect and unrealistic. But when they must go live in Colorado with their Uncle Claude their lives begin to change and they begin to grow apart. They compete. They irritate one another. They separate. Soon they are living vastly different lives and telling different stories.

And as it happened my heart broke alongside Molly's. She was desperately sad and angry at Ralph. She missed his attention. And while she longed for his love and friendship, I grieved for her loss. However, their lost relationship is expected, and normal, and I found the book richer, truer and more real as it happened.

There were brilliant, emotional and vivid moments that pushed me back in time to those days of my own childhood when I so desired to be prettier, sportier, funnier... when I sort of hated everything about the girl in the mirror. Molly's loneliness and anguish are familiar, and caused me to hold my breath and squint my eyes, trying to hold back the tears. She made me revisit some of the things that caused me the most pain in my own childhood. And while emotional and melancholy I left it feeling renewed and rehabilitated.

The ending of this little novel is brutal and melancholic but also the perfect wrap-up to this story.