Riley Patenaude 

ENG 330

10/1/21

Book Review #2

Shuggie Bain Book Review

Taking a look at Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, it is the life of Shuggie Bain as well as his mother Agnes Bain, who drinks her life away while he takes care of her. The whole novel is based around time. It starts off with Shuggie at sixteen years old, and as each section continues the plot changes. At one point we see him when he’s five years old, then when he’s ten turning eleven, and the last chapter picks up where the first one left off, so when Shuggie is sixteen. This novel shows the heartache and pain all the characters have gone through, but it also showed how much strength each character had which was touching during many passages of the novel. 

I personally think that this book was better than the last one that we read. I felt I could connect to Shuggie a lot more than I could with Tambu. And since there are so many characters in Shuggie Bain, if a reader couldn’t connect to Shuggie, I bet there was one they could. I also connected the pandemic to Stuart’s novel which is also why I feel like I connect with it a lot better. I would say that the novel Shuggie Bain relates to the pandemic in several different ways. There are also a couple differences I noticed between Shuggie’s life experience versus the pandemic. The whole arrangement of the book honestly reminded me of the sequence of the pandemic. Shuggie was living with his whole family and things were great, until his father wasn’t around as much and his mother started to drink. They eventually moved and after that Shuggie’s dad left them, then his older sister, and soon his older brother. Then, for a majority of the novel Shuggie and his mother were by themselves, they lost just about everyone they cared about. And at one point Shuggie and his family lost his grandparents from death in the span of only a couple months. This was all similar to the pandemic because so many of us lost so many people. Whether that be from death or just seperation. And at some points in the story the characters straved, similar to the pandemic when everything was running out at stores. 

After some time in Pithead Agnes and Shuggie decide it’s time to move to the city. From the sounds of it I was surprised that it didn’t come as more of a culture shock to either one of them. But I would say it was a somewhat better environment for them, at least for Shuggie. Agnes may have got caught up in the drinking and died, Shuggie found a place and someone who genuinely cared about him. The pandemic relates to shuggie blossoming and going into the city just like when the world started to essentially blossom back into life. I think that if Agnes didn’t die, Shuggie wouldn’t have blossomed. He put all of his strength and love into that woman with nothing in return. Shuggie also never really attended school that much as he got older, which relates to the pandemic because we barely had school. 

One difference between the novel and the pandemic is that the novel is based around shuggie from five to sixteen years old, while the pandemic has only been going on for a few years. But what is a big part of the novel that we see throughout the entire story is Shuggie’s mothers addiction to alcohol. But the book does deal with the rest of Shuggie’s family a decent amount. The book also takes us through struggles Shuggie has had, dealing and not dealing with his mom, that have affected him greatly. I believe that Shug is the one to blame here. If he didn’t leave Agnes and the kids, if he tried to fight for Agnes and get her better maybe things would have been different, no one can quit something like that on their own. But at one point in the novel Shug was saying goodbye to Agnes after he ended it and he said, “…he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good.” (110) Shug didn’t want another man to love her, and he succeeded in that. The only male to ever love her after Shug was Shuggie. 

I’ve noticed many people throughout the pandemic meeting new people and either becoming best friends or falling in love. With Shuggie he found a friend. I felt as though Leanne came in at the right time for Shuggie, he was struggling and just needed a person. Leanne and Shugge concluded that they don’t have feelings for one another but decided that they should date, so they did. Leanne was there for Shuggie when no one else was, he needed her and she needed him.  After reading Shuggie Bain I could tell why this book had won. For this being Stuart’s first novel I thought that it had a good timeline, great character development, and took the readers into the past. The novel revolved around nostalgia. Shuggie kept looking back on his life and remembered all the good and bad. We looked back on the good times during the pandemic, and now you could say we look back on the bad. For this book winning the 2020 Booker Prize and being published in 2020 while the pandemic is happening is pretty coincidental I would say. This novel highlights trauma, death, time, strengths, and power, similar to the pandemic.