Young Mungo Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Religious Sectarianism in Glasgow: Then and Now and our BookBrowse Review of Young Mungo.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. The novel takes place on two distinct time lines, and the painful connection between the two eventually becomes clear. How did you experience the repeated shifts between these two settings—Mungo, Gallowgate, and St Christopher at the loch, and Mungo, James, and the Hamilton family in Glasgow? How did you interpret the overlapping of the novel's two basic genres: a thriller tinged with violent horror and a queer romance?
2. The author communicates a great deal about the characters through their physical idiosyncrasies: Jodie with her "Haaah-ha" and Mungo with his facial tics and compulsive picking, as well as the body language of other characters toward him. Yet Mungo so often misses the meaning in other people's words. To what degree do you think a queer boy's survival in a homophobic atmosphere depends on his ability to read body language over spoken word? Does Mungo's ability to find love also depend on it? Don't we all have nervous behaviors and tics that reveal things about us?
3. The characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, made famous by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, speak to the presence of good and evil in all of us, indeed to the drive to distance ourselves from our dark sides by naming them—by making them—"other." At age eight, Jodie conjures the name Tattie-bogle for Mo-Maw's dark side. Does naming our dark sides help rob them of power? Is there a point—as in Jekyll and Hyde—when this coping mechanism loses its power? If that point comes for Tattie-bogle, when?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Grove Press. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.