From the Bookshelf of Queereaders…

Young Mungo

Douglas Stuart

Why we're reading this: Absolutely beautiful, and heartbreaking story of young love in working class Scotland. This book will bre…more
[close] Absolutely beautiful, and heartbreaking story of young love in working class Scotland. This book will break your heart and then slowly stitch it back together.

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

No group discussions for this book yet.

What Members Thought

Jun 04, 2022 Brian rated it really liked it

Young Mungo is a really good book, but be warned: It's also brutal, bleak, and dark. ...more

16 likes · Like · see review

Jun 12, 2022 Andy rated it really liked it

Shelves: good-not-great, lgbtq

There are not many writers than can take you to dark places and hold you there, but Douglas Stuart, smartly, spends as much time building the world our characters live in as he does the characters themselves, so the injustices in their experiences – both self-made and circumstantial – feel entirely plausible for a single group to endure.

For as difficult as “Young Mungo” is to stomach at times, I enjoyed it more than “Shuggie Bain.” Outside of the first third, which is slightly confusing with ti There are not many writers than can take you to dark places and hold you there, but Douglas Stuart, smartly, spends as much time building the world our characters live in as he does the characters themselves, so the injustices in their experiences – both self-made and circumstantial – feel entirely plausible for a single group to endure.

For as difficult as “Young Mungo” is to stomach at times, I enjoyed it more than “Shuggie Bain.” Outside of the first third, which is slightly confusing with timeline shifts and characters introduced almost all at once, the story morphs into a well-paced, tense thriller with a central romance.

It’s no surprise that Stuart uses pigeons to represent the boys. Symbolically they can mean transformation, freedom and luck – three qualities our characters earn and embrace in the end. But know the road there isn’t easy and is, at times, gut-wrenching.

I’d go as far as to say the budding love between Mungo and James was a homage to “West Side Story,” – complete with a Protestant vs. Catholic rumble – and the final moments in the dovecote broke my heart in two, not unlike Maria crying over Tony. Still, I left the story hopeful these two would be okay one day.

Outside of Mungo and James, only Jodie - Mungo’s older sister – were developed fully, but even she got tossed aside in the last third after slowly building momentum. Mo-Maw felt like a rehash of Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, and Hamish, Mungo’s older brother, was a caricature of a miscreant.

All told, Stuart showed a lot of improvement here, and by his third novel – that will probably also take place in 1980s Glasgow – he’ll fix the awkward POV shifts and half-developed characters. Then, he’ll have his first masterpiece.

While I read “Shuggie Bain” in all its Glaswegian dialect glory, I opted to listen to “Young Mungo.” Chris Reilly provides the listener with an authentic Scottish accent, which is both engaging and somewhat difficult to track.

I’ve spent time in Scotland and it took me listening at 1.25x speed and a fair amount of concentration to ensure I was interpreting the story correctly. Honestly, I probably only understood about 85 percent of the words as intended. All that to say, reading is likely the way to go. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 17, 2024 Sarah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-stars, 2024

A love story that reads like a horror story. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this book, but I couldn’t put it down and I’m sure I’ll never be able to forget it. The way that Douglas Stuart moved his characters through multiple traumatic timelines at once…what a horrific effect that has, captured by writing so beautifully descriptive that unfortunately you can taste the brine in your own mouth while reading. I’ll have to work up the nerve to read Shuggie Bain someday.

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 06, 2021 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: queer, historical-fiction, faves, international, 2021

I loved this book so much; I'm still thinking about it and I think I will continue to do so for a long time. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 26, 2022 Shawn rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, glbt

Well-written, certainly, but too entirely bleak for me to say that I even remotely liked or enjoyed it.

1 like · Like · see review

May 16, 2022 Emmett Racecar rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, queer

I can pretty much sum it up with one sentence. Everything awful you can think of that can happen, happens. It reminds me a bit of “A Little Life,” in the way trauma is used to propel the story. But where “A Little Life” made me throw the book across the room, “Young Mungo” make me want burn it.

Also, I had trouble engaging with the first half of the book. The second half was brilliant and could not put it down.

Needless to say any readers sensitive to child abuse, violence, murder, rape, abuse, ...more

Like · see review