Reviews with content warning for Drug use - Shuggie Bain

REVIEW :: Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart 😢

TW: suicide, sexual assault, alcoholism, neglect.

I’ve seen a whole heap of conversation about this book and so I was eager to read it and gather some of my own thoughts. I’m not someone who particularly pays attention to prize winning books, as I think liking books is always about personal preference & that I won’t always like something that a panel do, but all the same, its interesting to know what is deemed amongst the best at the moment. 💫

Shuggie Bain follows Shuggie, a young boy whose Mum, Agnes, is an alcoholic. The story follows their everyday life as Agnes battles her addiction and Shuggie battles being her child. I’ve had a few conversations with people about this book and one thing we all agreed on is that it is so inherently sad; there is no real joy or moments of happiness in the book, and this sadness can make it hard to read. In hindsight, I wish I had read it alongside another book and dipped in and out of it because this might have made it more digestible. For me, the portrayal of life as an alcoholic felt like a very real and raw one, and I found the presentation of Agnes as this glamorous, well-presented woman really interesting - demonstrating you cannot ever pretend what someone is experiencing when the doors close behind them.

My only real criticism of this book is that I think it left a lot of things unexplored. There were several events in the book that Stuart describes but then doesn’t refer to again and I think the book lacked the layers it could have potentially had. That being said, I think expanding on these moments would have made the book much longer, and also much sadder.

I think this is a hard book to recommend and its hard to say I ‘enjoyed’ it because that doesn’t feel like the right word, but I’m glad I read it and think its definitely a worthwhile read. 🌟

Content Warnings