J.P.’s Reviews > Young Mungo > Status Update

Mungo looked up and down the hill, and then kissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.

A fissure Mungo hadn’t known about cracked open in his chest; beneath it was a hollow feeling that had never bothered him before. It was an agony not to raise his own hand and touch the hairs James’s fingers had licked. It burned. He wanted nothing more than to feel the warmth left by his touch.

She had asked for violence out of a gentle soul and it made her feel like she had trampled a patch of fresh snow.

How could she tell Mungo that as he was fingering her that very first time, she had already started to trust him and doubt herself?

Three hours of peace in exchange for four sweaty, dirty minutes. He didn’t care anymore if she enjoyed it or not. At the beginning he would have asked if she was okay, worried that her tightness caused discomfort, but now he was delighted when it did.

Everyone hated Hamish, but everyone loved Jodie. It spoke to her great-heartedness that people who could not stomach Hamish or Mo-Maw still held her in such high regard. Mungo didn’t know where he fell in all of this. Sometimes he felt strangers looked at him like just another blemish on the life or this unstintingly good girl.

She was harshest on Mo-Maw in a way that only girls were allowed to be. She said it felt like having a lost dog you couldn’t admit had run away, a wayward bitch that you hoped would come home when her heat broke.

There was a gentleness to his being that put girls at ease; they wanted to make a pet of him. But that sweetness unsettled other boys.

The writing is so painfully beautiful.

I too love the smiths.