Description
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendant of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
Endorsements
“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?” — The Los Angeles Times
"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." — Jhumpa Lahiri
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.