Devestating, heartbreaking, brutal, beautiful, awe-inspiring, a masterclass in writing… I could go on. Douglas Stuart just really gets to the heart of people, he understands them and he paints them so vividly and sensitively with so much care and attention to detail. I was completely immersed from start to finish – a very special book with a love story at the centre that felt so authentic and raw. I found myself encaptured by tiny details – the way Stuart describes the people on a bus, the way the setting is described, the way the narrative shifts perspectives so seamlessly in a way that feels effortless. A brilliant and incredibly worthwhile read.

Young Mungo sat on my unread NG shelf for quite some time. I was afraid to dive into the dark themes, and I was waiting for when I was in the mood for a dark emotional read; however, that didn't come.

Young Mungo tells us the story of a boy and his alcoholic mother in working-class Glasgow. It's hard-hitting, aching, and heartbreaking, with themes of poverty, abuse, homophobia, and toxic male masculinity filled with violence. I don't usually shy away from dark stories, but this one was excessively so. I didn't feel anything hopeful coming for poor young Mungo, and I didn't hang in there long enough to find out if it did. I DNF it around the 70% mark.

The way I wept. Douglas Stuart, you are a talent.

A beautiful, heart-wrenching story of love against all odds. Two Glaswegian teenage boys who fall in love despite being on either side of the sectarian divide, and who dream of a better future together despite the odds stacked against them.

A true masterpiece. Read this book.

I didn't care for the writing style. It was very choppy and confusing. I liked the premise, but the overall just dragged too much. I expected more from such a beloved author.

'Young Mungo' is Douglas Stuarts second book after the Booker winning 'Shuggie Bain'.
Mungo is a young man facing hardship and conflict in his young life. When he develops feelings for his friend, in the backdrop of a time when it was not acceptable he faces more hardship and difficult times.
'Young Mungo' continues Douglas Stuart's realist and honest writing.
The characters are well developed and you feel like you are on their journeys with them.
It is a story that won't leave you and in a way makes you feel loss for the characters when you finish the book.
Highly recommended and a great read.
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley in allowing me to read in return for a review.

I'm glad I gave Stuart another go after not connecting with Shuggie Bain - even if this one didn't hit home as much as I wanted it to.

Young Mungo is a beautifully written story of a teenage boy in 1980s Glasgow, too sweet for the brutal reality around him, and gay in a time when it homosexuality was viewed with hatred. He befriends and then falls in love with a Catholic boy named James, in a Romeo-and-Juliet dynamic, although they both know it cannot end happily.

I actually enjoyed the writing so much - Douglas Stuart has the singular talent of bringing to the page deeply sweet, innocent characters and also dark, broken characters, and make us fall in love with both of them. Even when the characters do something cruel, still we feel that we understand their motives, even if we hate them for it.

This is a very, very brutal story, incredibly violent. I don't recommend it to more sensitive readers (like myself), for whom this book will feel like a miserable experience, despite its magnificent writing. I was also a little bit bored by the fact that Young Mungo reminded me so much of Shuggie Bain - this sweet, young gay boy, the youngest of three, to whom life in 1980s Glasgow dealt very harsh cards and a brutal life. I just felt like I'd read it before, even if Young Mungo was actually heading in different directions in terms of character development.

I would really, really like to see Douglas Stuart do something different for his next novel. He is incredibly talented and I look forward to reading more from him!

The story was so depressing! I understand that it was sort of the point of the whole thing, that Mungo has a shit life, but the poor kid couldn't catch a break. And his mother...what a dumbass! Let's send my kid off with two men I know nothing about for a weekend of camping. Brilliant plan! I was continually cringing through the whole book.

5 "perceptive, powerful, painful, poignant" stars !!

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.

I do not know how this little review will turn out and I do not wish to censor myself. After finishing this book and crying terribly I grabbed my beloved and asked him to take me out for a long night drive and I listened to slow Arabic love songs and held his hand.

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.

Young Mungo is anxious, needy, sweet, naive and terribly neglected. He is Other and is adrift and friendless until he meets James. The tenderest and sweetest of love unfolds and then...chaos, violence, hurt along with deep care, hope and a yearning for the wider world and connection to nature and beauty.

The prose is vivid and clear and superb. The dialogue zings with authenticity. The psychologies are startingly sound and the sociology unabashedly hyper realistic. The connection to emotions is genuine and painful and the breath is shallow and hurried.

Truly a magnificent and fierce read that permeated to a very deep level....

With humble thanks to Mr. Douglas Stuart !

Oh boy, what an epic novel. It draws you in and makes you feel like you are part of their lives. It is a massive book, but it wants you to read more. It is a rare glimpse into the life of these boys. Great read.

When I read Shuggie Bain I was drawn to it, interested in the story but was also irritated by it: it was too much, too sad, too tragic, meant only to bring out sadness. Young Mungo is similar, but different. The writing is more mature, the story is again tragic, the characters are constantly suffering, the atmosphere is gloomy, but this time, maybe even, not without hope. Cruelty, violence, alcoholism, poverty, rape, hard life that is impossible to escape from. The story was interesting, the characters were well written, I would say more complex than in Shuggie, I liked the delicate love story. But, again, that is it. Just an emotionally more mature version of Shuggie.

So first, I really loved Shuggie Bain and my interior monologue had a Scottish accent for actual weeks after reading it. This is not relevant to this review, I just had to share.

Stuart did not disappoint with this follow-up. He knows how to break a dang heart, and he does it again here. I have no criticism- I liked the two timeframes, the main characters, the amazing names, the writing- I just got my heart broken again.

That is all.

Thanks so much for the review copy!

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. After reading Shuggie Bain by the same author, I was anxious to read Young Mungo. This was another heartbreaking and beautifully written book. His characters are well developed and pull you into the story almost immediately. I’ll definitely read more by Douglas Stuart in the future.

I actually enjoyed this novel more than Stuart’s previous, the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain. There were a lot of overlaps between the two main characters, though I found myself more interested in Mungo, who seemed to have a life outside of just his mother. The heart of the novel, Mungo’s relationship with James, came a bit late, and I wished it was introduced earlier. I also found myself jolted by the back and forth time jumps in the beginning, but acquainted myself with them after a time. Overall I’d recommend this book even to people who didn’t love Shuggie Bain.

Ah what a follow up to Shuggie Bain. Yet another heartbreaking story that you can't put down. Really emotional with incredible writing. Would definitely recommend it.

Young Mungo is the newest Scottish book by author Douglas Stuart. This is a heartbreaker of a tale. Mungo is being raised in a tumultuous home by an alcoholic mother. He has an older brother and sister. The brother isn't very helpful but the sister tries to encourage Mungo to think beyond where he's living now and to plan for a better future. Mungo is struggling to figure out how he can be his authentic self while pleasing all around him. You can't help but feel for him. Read and enjoy!

From the author of the wonderful Shuggie Bain comes another novel set in Glasgow, and another plot about a young gay boy. Douglas Stuart is such a wonderful writer that the similarities just add to the enjoyment.

I will say right away that Douglas Stewart's much-anticipated second novel Young Mungo (2022) turned out to be my second disappointment of the year after the new Yanagihara. And here's why.

⁃ The cover and synopsis of Young Mungo sets readers up for a certain kind of feel: a coming-of-age novel about the love of two poor boys from opposing camps of Catholics and Protestants. In fact, however, Mungo and James' romance does not begin until the last third of the book and is given barely a tenth of the entire text.

⁃ Much of Young Mungo is very much a Shaggy Bane-like story of a young working-class boy in Thatcher Glasgow, forced to live in a violent environment, with an alcoholic mother and similarly unstable siblings: his brother is a gangster, and his sister (perhaps the brightest image of the book) gets pregnant by a teacher. The novel reads like a sequel to "Shaggy Bane" about a grown-up hero - if he was 10 in the first novel, he was 15 in the second.

⁃ For the first two-thirds of the book, almost nothing happens, very long exposition. The novel jumps structurally in two time strata: Mungo's life with his family in Glasgow, meeting James - and some time later a "tent from hell" on the lakeside with two men from the mother's AA club. Anything that could have been done to Mungo, these drunks here have done to him.

⁃ Young Mungo is stuffed to the top with brutal, detailed scenes of human cruelty at the bottom of society. Mungo is just a magnet for all the trigger-happiness. Rape, paedophilia, alcoholism, parental neglect, domestic violence, homophobia, teen abortion, etc. Misery porn is better than Little Life, but it won't bring a tear to your eye - Stewart's writing is both dry and redundant.

⁃ Stuart writes in a way that makes the reader uncomfortable. Lots of Gaelic slang, lots of broken colloquial grammar. The principle of show, don't tell is pushed far back, throughout the text the author repeats or paraphrases what he has just said. It looks something like this: Under a grey, dim, colourless sky in a square blown by a cold, piercing, northern wind, Mungo saw the town punk. "City punk," thought Mungo, but said nothing aloud and only kept silent.

⁃ On the whole I don't understand the point of this novel - just about everything Stewart is talking about here, all the Gaelic pain of a depressed city and the difficult experience of growing up - he told it all perfectly in Shaggy Bane, and Young Mungo looks like a self-repeat. Only this time Stuart has shifted the focus a bit from the alcoholic mother to her son, and dropped all 33 misfortunes on his head.

I was so excited when I got approved for an arc of this book. "Young Mungo" was my first book by Douglas Stuart. I haven't read his acclaimed debut novel "Shuggie Bain". But I heard so much praises of that one that I was immediately intrigued to read the author's next book, which is "Young Mungo". Sadly, it didn't work for me. I had such a hard time with it. Trust me no one is more disappointed than me at my dnf of this book.

I have always claimed myself as a versatile reader. I like to read books from almost all genres and very few things can trigger me. Unfortunately this books proved to be extremely triggering for me. Rape, body horror, abuse on children - these three things are (probably) are the only contents that can make me uncomfortable and triggers my mental health. And 45% into this book, there is a on page rape scene. Then we witness it repeating again and again. Though the scenes weren't graphic, rape of a fifteen years old, made me too uncomfortable. Soon after, I stopped reading this book. On page rape is something I really can't deal with. It might be just me, but come on... "Young Mungo" is being marketed as "a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men". False marketing at most. There are better books out there which offer us the exact same thing but in way better quality. However, Please be cautious if you're planning to read it.

The writing style was too wordy and desprictive. Too hard to get into. The pacing is not smooth either. It was, in a word, frustrating and boring.

Though English is not my first language, I'm fluent in English. But this book made me start doubting that for a long moment. "Young Mungo" is set in a rural housing estate in Glassglow. All of the characters were Glassglow natives and they were speaking English in their native tongue. Their accent was too thick to read the book effortlessly. I had to struggle a lot to get into it and continue reading until the 47% mark. This book literally took a toll on me. Never had I ever before, went through such hardship to read a book. I would highly suggest you to stay away from this book if you aren't a native speaking.

The book jumps between two timelines. In the first, we meet Mungo’s family, Mungo and James fall in love, and we look at the families and individuals who live around Mungo. The second is a camping trip from hell. The constant back and forth between the timelines was exhausting. The alterations were not smoothly done. Though Mungo is our main protagonist, there are also some other characters who narrate the story from time to time. The shifting of these povs were abrupt and too sudden. It was a real pain to keep track that's going on. And all of these was absolutely for nothing. It felt as though the author was complicating there unnecessarily. Lots of time, I had to go back and read some paragraphs several times to make sense of them. Yet mostly, I received nothing out of them. So, why make it difficult when it could have been as easy and calming as the gentle breeze of Spring?

I read “Shuggie Bain” the first book of the author right after it won the 2020 Booker Prize and immediately Douglas Stuart became my most coveted author of my lifetime. The sheer brilliance of the craft is simply sublime and I am still in awe of them after.
In Mungo we are introduced in the similar milieu as Shuggie's, set in Glasgow, an alcoholic mother, neglected adolescent life in poverty. Mungo too as Shuggie feels that his mother is his responsibility and he can save her.
Stuart’s prose perfect and is nuanced as expected in this book as well and he is exploring masculinity through the various male characters.
Thrusting with violence of all forms that punches in the gut, which Mungo a queer boy is exposed and subjected As difficult as Mungo's situation is he is exploring what it takes to be a man and what is in store for him.

Thank You to GroveAtlantiv and to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest feedback.