With sublime, masterful writing, exceptionally authentic characters, and ruthlessly heartbreaking story of love, family and survival, Young Mungo by award-winning author Douglas Stuart will take you to a whole new landscape of reading experience, one that you will not soon forget.


The writing is alive. It’s vividly descriptive, but not because of those big, pretentious adjectives that don’t fully register in the mind. Instead, it’s the similes, metaphors, and analogies to the simplest things that make it so easy to envision the scenes and make your head burst with colors.

I’ve never seen words used in such an effective and evocative way. And it was incredible how the author never seemed to run out of imageries and that each one was as good as the rest. He’s indeed a truly exceptional writer.

The characters are authentic beyond any I’ve encountered. They are not just fictional characters; they are real people. They can exist not only in the space between the beginning and the ending of the book with the sole purpose of acting out the story. They feel as though you can actually pull them out of the pages into the world, and they will breathe and live.

Oh, my dear Mungo. Him alone, forget about the story and everything else, can break your heart. He’s such a gentle soul with a precious heart and a vulnerable innocence. The mere thought of someone like him growing up and changing in any way is saddening. He did break my heart, and he wedged himself between the cracks. And there Mungo will stay with me forever.

I see plot elements as moving chess pieces. I constantly predict where they’re going, and I’m always, to a certain extent, right about where I’ll find them when the story ends. But my experience with this book was nothing like that. I almost never had to predict, but not because the plot was easily predictable. No, it’s because for me it was rarely about what was going to happen next and almost always about what was happening now.

The evocative scenes have a way of rooting you to the present. It makes you put aside your reactions to what has already happened and your worries to what might happen next and just experience the now in its full force and magnificence. And experience I did, and it was profound and unforgettable.

You know when you get something good but for a limited time only, and you can’t help but want more. That’s how I felt about the romance; I wanted just a little more of Mungo and James. I also felt like the romance was a bit underdeveloped, but that’s probably due to the author’s precise depiction of the “too fast, too deep” nature of young love. And the fact that it was young love didn’t make the tribulations of their relationship any less valid. It’s actually all those challenges that they had to face together that gave so much strength to their love and made me deeply invested.

The theme is constantly gloomy with the occasional darkening of clouds and the piercing ray of light. This is the reason why the book isn’t something you read in one sitting, or two, or even twenty for that matter. It eventually gets a bit too heavy to bear and a little tight in the chest. But no matter how many times I eventually stopped reading, I always soon jumped back in, looking for that somber magic that made me feel all those big, real emotions.

Indeed, there’s a lot of bleak content here, but there are also enough bright, happy, loving moments that warm the heart, and they’re the ones that stay with you long after the end and the ones that will make you want to come back someday.

So to conclude: It’s goes without saying that Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is highly, highly, recommended.


The ARC was provide by Grover Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Expected publication date: 5 April 2022.