Mar 30

Mar 30 Young Mungo

Author: Douglas Stewart
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.

Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

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!