*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free book.*

"Young Mungo" is about growing up poor, about growing up queer, about growing up in Glasgow. It's very hard to read sometimes, specific TW for violence, rape, addiction, sexual abuse, poverty. It's also a very honest novel about "Mungo", named after the Saint, who falls in love with a Catholic neighbour and how tries very hard to navigate his softness in a world of hard violence. I do not want to talk too much about the content, but there is not only trauma, there is also light and love. I especially enjoyed the ending.

4.5 stars

As with Shuggie Bain, the writing is truly amazing. The characters are incredibly real and gritty, and I really loved the Scottish dialect, it makes it incredibly immersive. The story too is absolutely heartbreaking, and the ending is really powerful. I really liked the alternating timelines, it was easy to see that something big was coming but it wasn't clear what.
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I did find it really slow though. There are a lot of really similar themes to Shuggie Bain, so that might have been part of it - that some of it felt repetitive to what I'd recently read. But ultimately I had to put it down a few times because I found myself reading to get through it instead of really getting into it. Maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace for a character-driven novel, but ultimately this didn't live up to Shuggie Bain for me. I'd give it 3.5 stars.

This story is heart-wrenching. Romeo and Juliete except queer and working-class set in Glasgow Scotland. It’s like a Front Bottoms song with a cello. Four stars.

TL;DR REVIEW:

Those who liked Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie will like this, and vice versa. I thought it was a bit repetitive of Shuggie and started a little slow, but I loved the Romeo & Juliet retelling and liked the book overall.

For you if: You like emotionally devastating queer literary fiction.

FULL REVIEW:

Thank you, Grove, for the advanced review copy of Douglas Stuart’s highly anticipated second novel, Young Mungo. I was a big fan of Shuggie Bain, and so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed this one too.

Young Mungo is about a 15-year-old boy in Glasgow, Scotland who’s secretly gay and caring for an alcoholic mother (sound familiar, Shuggie readers?). We bounce back and forth in time; in the “present,” Mungo is whisked off on a “fishing trip” with two imposing men his mother met at AA. In the “past,” we see him meet and fall in love with another young man named James, manage the expectations of his infamous older brother and doting older sister, and forgive his mother over and over — until the two timelines crash together, tragically. No spoilers, but I will say this: mind the trigger warnings on this book, if you have any need of them.

I liked this book overall, but I’ll start with the parts that didn’t work as well for me: First, this felt really, really repetitive of Shuggie. That’s sort of obvious from the synopsis, but even the mood, tone, and pace mirrored Stuart’s first novel. And that leads to the second thing: I felt so impatient as I made my way through the slower first half of the book; when would I get to something that felt different?

But if you can make it to the halfway mark, you’ll be rewarded; it does pick up and distinguish itself. Young Mungo is, eventually, a much more explicitly gay story (a love story!). And I didn’t realize this before I read it, but it actually turns into a legit Romeo and Juliet retelling, which was a fun discovery that I loved. It’s what finally lent the book a fresher feeling, in my opinion. By the end, I couldn’t tear my eyeballs away.

Fans of Shuggie will like this one, I think, and vice versa. I can’t wait to see what others think!

A riveting, heart-breaking, bittersweet, yet beautiful read, that will stay with you long after you've finished reading it. I even enjoyed this more than Shuggie Bain.

Council Estates, violence, two friends who should be enemies--who happen to fall in love--despite their circumstances. It's painful, it's dark, but it's full of hope and love, too.

It's not an easy read, but it is an amazing one.

This is a book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it.

Having finished reading this book a few weeks ago I still have vivid images in my mind of what Mungo, the lead character, went through. Luckily some of these images are good, but there are many that are not.

This book is so well written, that despite the horrors of the story, it just draws you in, you want to know what Mungo's story is and why he is placed in the awful situation that brings all of the separate storylines together.

This is a great book.

A deep and heartbreaking story about love, addiction, and sexuality. It took me a while to immerse myself in the writing style, but it is distinct and place you in the author's world. The book gets dark, but there is still tender love within its pages. I look forward to reading more from Douglas Stuart!

Young Mungo is the second novel from the 2020 Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart. It’s a gritty, heartbreaking story set in working-class Glasgow in the post-Thatcher years. The main character, Mungo, is a 15-year-old boy living with his alcoholic mother, abusive brother and a genius sister. Mungo and his family are Protestant and when he meets and falls for James, his neighbor who not only is male but Catholic, it becomes very clear that their love is more than forbidden - it’s dangerous.

I am absolutely blown away by this book. It reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life: a Great Gay Novel, except Young Mungo doesn’t focus on the elites and there’s much less trauma - which is not to say that it doesn’t have it at all. It’s a heart-wrenching, heavy novel that manages to find glimpses of joy and love in a sea of bleakness. It’s sad, yes, but it also makes space for hope, and that’s a big part of how satisfying it felt to read it. Since English isn’t my first language, accents written out in dialogue can be tricky and make reading a book more difficult, but although Stuart uses that technique here, I found the dialogue easy to follow and understand. The writing was gorgeous, reading Stuart’s style felt like watching a movie and some of the phrases he used will stay with me for a long time. The plot - a working-class, queer Romeo and Juliet story, but much darker - was familiar yet unique, and it hooked me from the very first page. The characters were so memorable and fascinating, so well-developed, that I couldn’t help but feel very strongly about every single one. It wasn’t always love, though - some characters in Young Mungo are the most despicable people I have ever read about. Mungo himself was my favorite - a gentle, scared boy searching for warmth and love.

TLDR: Young Mungo is an extraordinary, powerful novel about difficult family relationships, queerness, masculinity, and finding tenderness in very hard places.

Young Mungo is gorgeous. Bleak, moving, and propulsive even in its slowness, this story will stay with me for some time.

There is so much quiet in this book, broken by clashes of all kinds. When it comes to its first haunting crescendo, Mrs. Campbell declaring that 'Ye’re too wee to know anything about men and their anger', the story's concerns crystallise in real time, and everything that comes after stands in the shadow of that crystallisation. The quiet persists in the doocot and the wilderness, but any quiet found in Glasgow-after-Thatcher is a complicated one, and these parts are often harder to read than the roaring fury which erupts, inevitably, at intervals.

It takes something for me to pick up any buzzy literary fiction these days, but I'm glad I did here. It won't be for everyone, but it was very much for me.

It's a shame to see that the main complaint raised on less impressed reviews is 'Stuart has already written a book about working class Glaswegians', as if there are not entire stacks of books written about other cities by the writers who know them and love them and hate them. There is always more to say.

I received a digital review copy of this book from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Young Mungo, like Douglas Stuart's previous book Shuggie Bain, didn't land for me. I'm not sure why, but both books felt eerily similar and almost a continuation of one another. I don't know if it's Douglas Stuart's writing style or if I'm just not interested in the content, but I can't seem to get myself any further than the 17% I did already. While it wasn't for me, I can say that lovers of Shuggie Bain will feel right at home with Young Mungo.

Beautifully and intricately written, this novel will pull on your heartstrings and turning your page for the full four hundred of it.

I haven’t read Shuggie Bain yet, however am very willing to now that I’ve read this.

This was masterfully created, with each detail handled with such love and elegance while also maintaining the plot.

This book follows the main character, Mungo as he moves through life trying to find his place. Mungo is a protestant, and meets James, a Catholic. With different forms of belief, these boys begin to grow a love for each other. Surrounded in a world that is overly masculine and entitled to their opinions, these boys don’t know what to do when they have both different religious belief and being what their world considers as “different.” How can they find their love in a world not allowing?

Douglas Stuart is an amazing writer and made not move for four hours just trying to see what happens next.

Whoever says this isn’t a coming-of-age is wrong, because this book includes every aspect of coming of age that you could want with the addition of literary fiction.

I’ve heard a lot about Douglas Stuart’s writing and how amazing it is, and I couldn’t agree more. I had to write down so many quotes because of the amazing writing.

One thing I will say I didn’t like about this was the pacing. Although I think every detail was amazingly made, I did feel that some could be left out. The first 145 pages was just a lot of exposition and not much happening, which I know is common for literary fiction. But in literary fiction they use the first hundred pages to develop and introduce the character, which I think this book lacked.

Regardless of the fact — this book was amazing.

all in all: a 2022 must read; would not be surprised if it gets nominated for the Booker Prize.

It would be difficult to avoid fancy words such as "atmospheric" or "gorgeous" when reviewing "Young Mungo," which reads faster than I anticipated, although I admit I had to take a few breaks here and there because of the graphic nature of the novel. Make sure you check the trigger warnings before you start this one, even if they might be a bit spoilery. I think it's better to err on the side of caution, just in case. I didn't, and I swear at one point in particular I was so upset I had to stop reading altogether.

"Young Mungo" is the story of a 15 year old Protestant boy living in a council estate in Glasgow during the 1990s. He has an alcoholic mother and he is the youngest of three siblings. They and the other Glaswegians represent a jaded and struggling working class, trying to keep their heads above water. That backdrop is sadly filled with violence and misery, and doesn't take kindly to queer people, people like Mungo and like James, the Catholic boy he falls in love with.

I haven't read "Shuggie Bain" and I'm not sure I will due to the similarities, but I can tell you I found Douglas Stuart's second novel stunningly crafted and beautifully moving, even if it was a little too depressing. Few characters are really likeable in this, but they all feel so very vivid. The emotional psychology was stellar. Some scenes are disturbing and nauseating, juxtaposing beauty and horror. While I may have read this compulsively, I'm glad I am where I am now, sitting in front of my computer, polishing this review and waiting for Stuart's next literary piece.

I haven’t read Shuggie Bain but after this book I am in awe of Stuart’s way with words. His writing seems so effortless. Simple yet beautiful. And I think that his way with words and storytelling is what’s pulling this story to something great.
Don’t get me wrong, this story that gets told, a lot of peoples stories actually.. it needs to be told. It’s so refreshing hearing the underdogs of the world in this kind of book. Stuart doesn’t try to make this life sound more beautiful or perfect. He tells it the way it is, raw and harsh.

The story, needs to come with a lot of warnings for the readers. It is not an easy story to read even if you fly through it. There is a lot of abuse and violence. Different kinds of abuse including domestic abuse, sexual assault and rape. There is also a lot of neglect and emotional trauma from cultural oppression and so on.
The book makes you feel raw and sad and angry. But it doesn’t just make you feel, it makes you think and push your moral stand on what’s right and wrong.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Press for the opportunity to read this e-arc in exchange of an honest review.

wow!

no shit. this book was a deep dive in an absolute hell hole called toxic and dysfunctional family.

it is a swirl of everything you can see within a book. innocence, ruination, middle ground, alcoholism, love, acceptance, strength, courage, and many more.

i felt like part of the book were too dry for me to give this a complete five star, but i wouldn't deny this book the love it deserves. i would be very much willing to pick this book up again and discover things i didn't first notice. however, i'm not, for sure, ready for it any time soon.

a heavy read with eye opening struggles, this book is definitely a must read.

This book was absolutely incredible. I wanted to drown in it, to rage and scream with Mungo. I wanted to throw my fists at the injustice of it all and laugh at the rawness of life and sit a while longer in the scraps of poor, ordinary life with the broken people that makes us who we are.

The way Douglas wrote out this beautiful, fragile and unapologetically kind kind boy made me want to weep. Mungo is a treasure and I wanted to cling to him and kiss his heart better and just experience more life with him.

The Scottish culture and people and atmosphere was so stunning. I gulped it down like I was starved for air. The tender, shy romance and the gut ripping fear and the heavy sadness and grief all wrecked me. I adored this book so much. It was solemn and it was tragic but it was so full of sweetness and big big love. I was satisfied with the ending.

The gritty life of poverty and religious divide in Glasgow. I’m not sure exactly the time frame but the book mentions homosexuality being criminal so I’m guessing before 1980. I’m not familiar with Scottish culture so I’m sure I missed other factors that gave a nod at the year.

This book also has beautiful autistic representation and possibly Tourette’s. All the more reason to read it. Had I not been sold already from the blurb, that would have absolutely won me over.

A masterfully written book. I own Shuggie Bain, but haven't gotten the chance to read it yet. I thought it'd be interesting to start with Stuart's second book, to see if it lived up to the hype of his debut. It absolutely did.. The writing is beautiful, and you fall in love with these characters as you watch them grow and come into themselves. It's poignant and stunning and I look forward to reading his previous book now, because I'm certain that it will live up to the high expectations that Young Mungo set for him.

Trying to keep my review spoiler-free so I'll just say this:
I did not expect this book to be so dark, yet so poignant. It took me some time to get into the story but then it swallowed me whole and I found myself transported into it, thanks to the author's captivating style and the well fleshed-out characters. If you know me, you'll know that the complexity of the characters is something that makes or breaks a book for me, and I was not disappointed in this instance. I tend to take some emotional distance when reading a book that lets me know it'll be painful, but when the book is well-written, it dismisses my efforts and demands my investment, and so I found myself genuinely caring about the story and Mungo's fate, passionately hating certain characters and, as I read on, increasingly hoping for a happy-ish ending. It was nevertheless a very heartbreaking, yet enjoyable book.
Keep in mind, though, that this book is pretty difficult to read, as I had to take breaks many times, with quite a few potentially triggering themes.

god, this book is brutal. so dark and heavy and painful, and hopeless even in its greatest moments of hope. there are so many trigger warnings: violence, sexual assault, sexual assault of a minor, domestic abuse. at times it felt like trauma was just being stacked on and on (like a little life) but then trying to think about what life would be like for a weird, gay, lower-class protestant kid in glasgow in a family with a selfish, alcoholic mother, a gang leader-type older brother and a genuinely good sister, whose only joy in life is the catholic boy he falls in love with, maybe it wasn't too much. i wish this book spent more time living in that joy, instead of in the unforgiving horror that was the consequence of it.

i guess i was hoping for a nice love story set alongside religious differences in scotland, and instead got a truly horrible, painful, maybe too real story of being gay in whatever decade this took place, and honestly, i would encourage zero of my queer friends to go through this, no matter how well done it was.

in the end, this book was more about family than anything, and the family absolutely tore me apart. it was the loneliest book i’ve read in some time because of this dynamic.

i'll also say that it was far more historical fiction than i realized, which isn't really my style. had it not been an arc, i likely would have dnf'd from boredom, but i'm glad i pushed through because i felt absolutely destroyed at the end.

i just want to hug mungo and hide him and james from the world. that is all.

3.5/5

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

'Young Mungo' is a compelling coming-of-age story about Mungo, a 15-year-old gay, working-class boy, set in the 1980s/1990s Glasgow housing estates.
It deals with themes of alcoholism, violence, poverty, homophobia, religion and abuse.

Mungo is a lovely soft-hearted boy who doesn't have an easy life. He comes from a dysfunctional Protestant family.
His father is long gone. He lives in a council flat with his loving sister, Jodie, who looks after the household as best she can. She's determined to go to University and escape this miserable life. They're neglected by their alcoholic mother who leaves them alone for weeks at a time with no food in the house while she spends any money she has on alcohol.
Their older brother, Hamish, is the respected leader of a gang of Protestant boys who engage in petty crime and feuds with the neighboring Catholic gang.
Hamish wants Mungo to follow his steps and join the gang, while Jodie wants him to do better and escape their working-class life and poverty.
Mungo's only joy in life is James, a gentle Catholic boy from his neighbourhood who he falls in love with.

"It was only a matter of time before James would be hurt, and for what? For liking Mungo Hamilton, the ruiner of all good things."

When his mother, Mo Maw, finds out about their relationship, she sends Mungo away on a camping trip with two questionable men from her AA group who promise to give him a 'proper' manly education.

'Young Mungo' is gripping and devastating at the same time, but told with so much heart.
It is beautifully written, the writing is poetic and lyrical, but the themes and the mood of the novel are bleak and dark for most of the story.
To say this book emotionally destroyed me would be a massive understatement!
I got so immersed in the world Douglas Stuart has created in this novel.
He paints an incredible picture of Glasgow in the 1990s, and the lives of the working class in post-Thatcher Britain. He also makes it so easy for me to visualize everything that is going on in such a cinematic way. Stuart successfully makes me feel so deeply for all the characters, especially young Mungo. My heart ached for him and I mourned his loss of innocence.

"There was a gentleness to his being that put girls at ease; they wanted to make a pet of him. But that sweetness unsettled other boys."

It's not an easy read by any means, and there is a lot of difficult content to endure in this book. Having said that, I would highly recommend 'Young Mungo' to anyone who likes dark, gritty and realistic novels, because this is one of those stories that will stay with you for a long time.

Thank you to @netgalley and @groveatlantic for the digital ARC of 'Young Mungo' in exchange for my honest review.
'Young Mungo' comes out on April 5, 2022!

Oh Douglas Stuart you kill me. First with Shuggie and now with beautiful Mungo. I’m forever wounded. 💔❤️
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Another of my most anticipated releases for 2022, I couldn’t wait for the physical book and stalked @netgalley until it appeared.
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I initially thought it was a sequel to Shuggie - set in Glasgow, a young boy with one sister, one brother, and an alcoholic mother… but it’s not, although there are a lot of similarities in themes, settings, characters, writing style and the era.
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Mungo is different in a number of ways though - I think it’s more brutal and violent in parts, and I also think it’s sweeter and more beautiful in parts. I feel like I’ve been on an absolute roller coaster and now that I’ve finished I don’t know whether to cry or smile or just lie here feeling slightly ill.
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What a writer! What a story! Not for the faint hearted - but if you like your books with a side of trauma (think slight shades of A Little Life or Shuggie) - then you will love this one.