I attempted this several times before my netgalley arc expired, but it sadly wasn't to be. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong because I loved Shuggie Bain and, in many ways, this is a very similar kind of story with a similar tone.

Mungo Makes New Friends | Mantra Lingua UK Mungo Makes New Friends | Mantra Lingua UK

Fifteen-year-old Mungo shows the kind of vulnerability that makes people want to cradle him — or crush him. He’s the tender Scottish hero of Douglas Stuart’s moving new novel, “Young Mungo.” It’s a tale of romantic and sexual awakening punctuated by horrific violence. Amid all its suffering, Mungo’s story makes two things strikingly clear: 1) Being named after the patron saint of Glasgow offers no protection, and 2) Stuart writes like an angel.Born in Glasgow, Scotland, after receiving his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, he has lived and worked in New York City. She had asked for violence out of a gentle soul and it made her feel like she had trampled a patch of fresh snow." The blurb makes it seem like it's a forbidden love story between a Protestant boy and a Catholic one. This forms just a small part of the storyline. The main story is more like a bildungsroman, but not in a good way. It's a long time since I've felt such sympathy for a fictional character. Mungo is so confused and anxious - he even has a tic that makes his face twitch when he gets stressed. He yearns for compassion from Mo-Maw, treats her like a queen and gets nothing in return. When his friendship with James looks like it might turn into something more, you're absolutely rooting for him. If anybody deserves a shot at happiness it's poor Mungo, a caring, thoughtful boy who has been dealt such a bad hand.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart - Pan Macmillan Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart - Pan Macmillan

It actually became so much fun to engage in the Glaelic-Scottish dialect- (the endangered language), that I’ve started saying *Aye* instead of yes, to my husband. And…..”Ye’re only a wee, thing, ye?” ——I got very funny looks from Paul - but he laughed and rolled with my new word play. The main protagonist is the fifteen year old Mungo Hamilton, son of a largely absent alcoholic single-mother (herself still under 35) and largely bought up by his older sister Jodie (now 17) in a Glasgow housing scheme. While Jodie is both well liked and studious, the two year older Hamish (Ha-Ha), despite his short stature and “speccy” appearance is a widely feared gang leader, head of a Protestant group of Billy Boys who engage both in crime and in brutal fights against the neighbouring Catholic gang from the next settlement – the Royston Bhoys. Dinnae worry, grinned Gallowgate. We’ll get you away free that scheme. We’ll have a proper boy’s weekend. This novel is both intensely intimate and wildly Shakespearean. A family drama, a love story and a coming of age play out in an intensely macho and homophobic Glasgow in the 1980s.The new book by the author of Shuggie Bain! As gritty and heartbreaking, but also gorgeously showing the sweet love between two Glaswegian boys. I didn’t understand that the conflict between Protestants and Catholics raged in Scotland as Ireland. It’s the 1990s and fifteen year old Mungo lives in a Glasgow housing estate. He’s a soft soul in a hard world. His older brother is the leader of a gang and is trying to toughen Mungo up. His mother is a drunk and more absent than present. His sister tries to run the household while living her own life. Mungo meets James, a Catholic, and they fall in love. The only thing worse in this milieu than a cross sect romance is a queer romance. There is none of the sentiment or accidental empathy here that accrued to the mother figure in ‘Shuggie Bain’, by dint of the reader spending so much time in her sozzled company (hogging the limelight from her son, whose name after all does adorn the cover).

Mungobooks - AbeBooks - Poole Mungobooks - AbeBooks - Poole

Yer mammy felt us all about that mess ye got yourself into with those dirty Fenian bastards. Catholics, man. Butter widnae melt. Mungo had been trying not to think about it”.Set in the autumnal Highlands of Scotland, Mungo is a horse who has seen better days. Now, old and lonely, he has nothing to look forward to. But, slowly, he is introduced to a series of new friends who share his meals. As the seasons change, and winter comes, Mungo is taken away to his winter stables and his loyal friends must work out how to stay with him. Find yourself in Jill Newton’s beautifully illustrated Scottish Highlands, and join Mungo and his friends on their adventure.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart review – grit and longing in

A key challenge for the author I think will be to show that he can move on in his writing (in his third novel which I believe is to be set in the Hebrides) but for now this is an excellent companion piece to his Booker a prize winning book. The book plays out in two halves. The first set over a number of months is Mungo’s life in the period up to, during and after his relationship with James. The second a few months later is the aftermath, the book opening with Mo-Maw sending him on a rather hastily arranged fishing and camping trip to a remote Scottish loch with two men she knows from AA (Gallowgate and St (Sunday-Thursday) Christopher) – the two having proposed it as a way to man-up Mungo – the trip itself forming the second narrative strand. But in a fiercely violent masculine and heterosexual working class world, one ironically made only the fiercer and more violent by the otherwise emasculating impact of the Thatcher-era cuts on the heavy industry that built the culture: Mungo’s even bigger struggle is to somehow conform to the conventions and expectations of others (not the least Ha-Ha), when he himself is sensitive, artistic, nervous (with a facial tic which may be Tourette’s and a number of other compulsive behaviours) and increasingly aware of his attraction to his own sex. In a Nutshell: Depending on what you like as a reader, you are either going to love this book or hate it. Very few will fall in the in-between range. Unfortunately for me, I hated it. The audiobook made matters worse. I’m also totally torn on how to rate this book. I didn’t enjoy it at all but I can appreciate the writing. The story is so heavy, it’s like walking around with 20# weights on your shoulders. But that’s the point.Jodie felt the floor tilt underneath her. Like a gable end slated for demolition, the front facade of her fell away and the private contents of her life rolled out. She was being torn down, and every mismatched bed sheet in her mind was to be exposed for all to see." A warm thank you to Netgalley, the author and Grove Atlantic for an e-copy. This was released April 2022 and I am providing my honest review. Both books have a Saints name and legend at their heart. The legend of St Agnes (and “I am on fire. I do not burn”) forms the basis of an impromptu sermon in “Shuggie Bain” when Agnes first attends AA about how alcoholism consumes everything – something which of course is at the tragic heart of that novel. Here Mungo is explicitly named by his (Protestant) mother after Glasgow’s Patron Saint – and the Saint’s four miracles (featured on the Glasgow crest) “the bird that never flew, the tree that never grew, the bell that never rang, the fish that never swam” are also subtly and brilliantly reversed at key and tragic points in the novel (with pigeons that will never fly again, an attempted conflagration, a man named Bell as well as a phone call with consequences, an aborted fishing trip and series of near drownings).