Review
An e-arc of the book has been provided by the publisher, Grove Atlantic, in exchange for an honest review.
The best first liner in trying to describe this book would be a warning: Young Mungo contains a number of trigger warnings, so please be careful before you start reading it—from rape, violence, parental neglect, to early pregnancy.
With that out of the way, can I just say how lovely it would have been to have the chance to read this book in a rainy, gloomy day? Such weather will perfectly shroud you with the exactness of the moments within the story and it sets an undeniably impeccable mood for the book. Sadly, I didn’t get that chance and read this in the heat of a Philippine summer.
There is a uniqueness to this book that was served well with the use of accent. If I didn’t read Flowers of Algernon just last month, this would have been my first book that seamlessly incorporated an audible character in writing with the Glaswegian speech that you can clearly hear a voice in your head while reading.
It is, of course, without a tradeoff. As much as this unique characteristic of the book shared a fondness with the reader, it also provided a complication in not just the speed with which you read, but also with comprehension. I wouldn’t say that it posed too much of a problem; however, it can get into you in the first few bits of the book.
I enjoyed the good mixture of characters within the story—how each of them, despite seemingly good or bad, are flawlessly flawed. Mungo and his naivety supported well the reliability and standpoint of the other characters. It might sound weird as he is the main character of the story, but I believe they all fit well together that even he was able to provide them with a structure as much as they to him.
As for the writing, I think there was incoherence with the sequencing of the story—the way it flips and changes tempo with its length towards another transition—yet I also saw it as something really easy to go through, I know it is contradicting but, to be fair, despite my appreciation with this types of read, I always find a chunk of them boring until I finish reading them and appreciate its nuances.
In writing this review, I can see how this book can easily be a 5-star read. However, I find the pacing of the story particularly slow although it did give a better brewing time for the story. Perhaps some part of the book could have been jumbled up to make the sequencing a little bit better, but aside from that, the book was perfectly splendid.
Haunting and riveting, Young Mungo spectacularly enveloped its readers with melancholy while it grapples to maintain a myriad of situation. It illuminates its readership with a glimpse of life within queer love and the struggles of a working class family.
