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

Something in him could not stand to be loved.

I love the Smiths.

She hadn’t needed to ask if it was about Mo-Maw. Everything about this boy was about his mother. He lived for her in a way that she had never lived for him.

Violence always preceded affection; Mungo didn’t know any other way.

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?

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.