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

If Jodie, of all people, could not love him, all of him, perhaps he could not be loved.

First, he had not been man enough; now he was too much.

The men had looked at him as though they knew what lay inside his soul, things he had not even admitted to himself. They knew the inescapable shame of it, how isolated it made him feel, and they had used that to separate him from his home and do as they pleased.

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.