Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
0 0Not quite what I was expecting. It's rich in slang spelling and terms that would have discouraged me from finishing it if it wasn't for the audiobook narrator with his awesome accent. Scottish is great to listen to, not so much when you're trying to read more than two sentences strung together, it seems. The story itself is hard to judge. There's so much sadness, unfairness and pure human ugliness between these pages and I keep seeing the book being compared to A Little Life but I don't really think it paints a realistic picture. It reminds me a lot of the show Shameless with the way the characters live and act. The two main points in the summary - the religious difference and the relationship between the two boys - isn't explored in as much depth as you would expect. The focus is in part on the mundane side of Mungo's life and in part on the aftermath of his "exile". We are told, rather than shown, how cruel everyone in his life is and we take part in his loneliness, anxiety and fear while he tries to return things back to the way they were before. The topics and triggers of this book never sit right with me and they are a ball in my stomach even now but I can appreciate the author's craftsmanship and skill, and I very much enjoyed the ending of it all.
0
© 2024 Pagebound