Book Summary and Reviews of A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee

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Janine_S

Historical coming of age
An historical novel - faux memoir - that follows a 12 year old Korean-American boy, Jeon-Gi, growing up in a town north of NYC in the 1970s and which falls into the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) genre.

Jeon-Gi must navigate cliques, street fights, his mother’s expectations and learn what it means to be Korean and American. He’s torn between competing ideas of himself at home and with his peers. At home he’s doted in, outside he’s bullied and ridiculed. His parents send him to a Korean summer camp. There he experiences a series of firsts: a first crush, first serious friendships, a first glimpse of mating, and the first taste of independence. With these firsts come botched attempts as might be expected, but these are not presented as humorous, rather with a deep “emotional fragility,”. Then Jeon-Gi does something that “he had no thought” of that results in his expulsion from the camp.

This is a grim story. It focuses heavily on how Jeon-Gi is treated by others - prepare yourself for some awfulness. Jeon-Gi becomes convinced he’s just someone to whom bad things happen. With this gruesome thought hovering over him, Jeon-Gi’s character shows how such thinking can impact a life.

This is a character-driven novel. It’s a study of what can happen becoming Americanized when you are an immigrant - in our current white supremacist world, the expectation is the immigrant must preserve that world; other cultural norms aren’t white enough. Jeon-Gi is treated terribly by our white world.

My thanks to NetGalley and Riverhead Books for granting me access to this ARC.

Other books by Chang-rae Lee at BookBrowse