Young Mungo

I had a hard time to start with this book but I'm glad I finished it! I was here for the gay story, and on the back of Bastard Out of Carolina I was not ready for another tale of misery and abuse growing up in a hard-scrabble family and place. Honestly it was pretty brutal reading and I almost quit. But ChatGPT assured me there was a sweet gay romance to come and once I got there I enjoyed the book all the more.

Not to discount the misery parts: they are very important to the novel. And serve well to highlight how special the brief moment of grace in teenage romance is. Usually in gay novels the central conflict is about being gay. And while that's certainly part of Young Mungo's woes the real conflict is the sectarian gang warfare and his abusive family. It makes for an interesting sort of Romeo & Juliet novel, where part of the tragedy is that Juliet is actually an other Romeo but the bigger problem is the Capulets and Montagues. (And the whole damn town).

I liked the structure of the book. It was a bit confusing at first, two interwoven narratives at different at times. But when he brings them together it's quite a shock, a sort of foreshadowing of yet more misery to come, and that moment is powerful.

I enjoyed the Scots language stuff. Some fun vocabulary words in there. Some of the dialect writing is a little thick and hard to read but it's all reasonable and important to the color of the book.

Mostly I loved how warmly the romantic scenes shone through all the grime of tenement Glasgow. Even in a grimy dovecot the pure love and beauty of the young men is undeniable. The writer is a remarkably good prose stylist. "an eyeful of alabaster and rose, the glacial blue of inner arms with their veins like violet rivers"