A review by escape_through_pages
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.5

📖 REVIEW 📖

I was apprehensive. When I read the synopsis my first thoughts were that Mungo sounded like Shuggie in different clothes, would it read like a redraft?

Mungo is, like Shuggie, a poor lad from poor Glasgow with an older brother (a gang leader),  older sister, an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Again, like Shuggie, Mungo as the youngest son, is the one who feels tied to his mother by familial love and obligation. 

‘Everything about this boy was about his mother. He lived for her in a way that she had never lived for him.’

But instead of reading like a rehash, I came to the view that Mungo and Shuggie could have been neighbours, plausibly co-existed in their communities. It didn’t feel like a reread.

It took less than a page for me to again be seduced by Douglas Stuart’s way with words. I’ll read every novel this man publishes, so readable yet accomplished is his narrative. It’s measured and always perfectly paced. I’m a big fan of his use of Glaswegian dialect and phonetic speech, it really serves to place the reader in the locality. His descriptions are always so accurate and vivid. I went to high school through the nineties and when I read this passage about how the cool girls styled their hair, I couldn’t believe how on the money it is, girls at my school did exactly this:

‘… their hair was gelled and scraped away from their faces. Each of them had a fringe, spindly and stiff, that they had rolled and lacquered over a round brush. Now they shot out and curled over their bright faces like awnings on a shopfront.’

This is the story of Mungo’s coming of age and of first love. The scenes between Mungo and James were so tenderly written and a direct contrast to the dread and sense of impending doom evoked by the chapters documenting the fateful fishing trip Mungo is sent on. I swear my heart sped up in fear when those pages arrived. 

It’s devastating in its testament of sectarian violence, intolerance, the power of addiction and the desire to love and be loved. It’s another score for Stuart.