If you can handle the pain and the violence, then I would recommend the read. But for Mungo, if you at any point told him, “son, it gets better,” I fully expect he would have socked you. And we are always going to need stories about our endurance-I would hope, not always, but I am less than optimistic about that. (This is especially true for BIPOC and/or trans folks-half the states in the Union this week are introducing legislative bullshit to curb and harm in the guise of protecting children.) We are always enduring something for the fleeting promise of some sort of happiness. Let me say, first: people can and should write about whatever stories they need or want to, and, from experience, there are LGBTQIA individuals who have no choice but to endure. There is this frustrating tendency in novels about gay men and women, especially in literary fiction, to have characters endure. Mungo Hamilton, a 15-16yo kid, endures every kind of pain you can endure in a literary fiction about homosexuals. Even the most beautiful writing feels like a weak salve when a book is so filled with sorrow and tragedy. While Young Mungo is one of the better-written books I have read in a while, its language, by the end, feels more like a eulogy for our protagonist.
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