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A Tender Age
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Overview
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence
"A tour de force... One of contemporary American literature's major chroniclers of manhood." --The Atlantic" A] knockout... Lee reinvents himself with each book." --The Boston Globe"Moving... a classic bildungsroman." --The New York Times Book Review
"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." --Jhumpa Lahiri 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 descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, 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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798217048441
- ISBN-10: 9798217048441
- Publisher: Riverhead Books
- Publish Date: August 2026
- Dimensions: 8.52 x 5.78 x 1.22 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.98 pounds
- Page Count: 368
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Time may be a salve, but, like most ointments, it ameliorates rather than cures. Some emotional scars never fade, especially those incurred during adolescence. Pulitzer finalist Chang-rae Lee (The Surrendered) presents that painful truth with clear-eyed grace in A Tender Age, a brilliant novel about a son of Korean immigrants who contends with racism and various distresses incurred in growing up in the 70s U.S.
The year is 1976, when America celebrated itself and its intended ideals for its bicentennial. Jeon-Gi, age 10, lives with his sister and parents in a town north of New York City that is “much darker-skinned and poorer than the surrounding villages and hamlets.” He spends much of his time with contemporaries who live in the same complex. One is a girl his age, “the queenly ten-year-old with the pinkish sun-kissed shoulders and scary diamond cat eyes,” who bullies him when they’re alone in the nearby woods.
Even more devastating are cruelties inflicted by a boy at school. The harassment grows so intense that Jeon-Gi brings a 10-inch carving knife to school one day and produces it when his antagonizer shoves him. The school suspends Jeon-Gi for the rest of the year. His behavior strikes everyone, including a lenient judge, as an aberration, given that Jeon-Gi is a “clean-cut, soft-spoken, somewhat overcourteous” kid who comes from a loving family, goes to church and is a Cub Scout.
A social worker suggests he attend a retreat sponsored by his church in upstate New York. The final two-thirds of the novel are set at that camp, an experience that includes not only standard summer-camp experiences like a crush but also traumatic episodes that linger well after summer ends.
Coming-of-age stories can be mawkish, but not Lee’s novel: It’s nuanced and dramatically rich, presenting a frighteningly accurate depiction of adolescence that offers no easy answers. A Tender Age is another powerful work about identity formation and the American experience from one of America’s best authors.
Time may be a salve, but, like most ointments, it ameliorates rather than cures. Some emotional scars never fade, especially those incurred during adolescence. Pulitzer finalist Chang-rae Lee (The Surrendered) presents that painful truth with clear-eyed grace in A Tender Age, a brilliant novel about a son of Korean immigrants who contends with racism and various distresses incurred in growing up in the 70s U.S.
The year is 1976, when America celebrated itself and its intended ideals for its bicentennial. Jeon-Gi, age 10, lives with his sister and parents in a town north of New York City that is “much darker-skinned and poorer than the surrounding villages and hamlets.” He spends much of his time with contemporaries who live in the same complex. One is a girl his age, “the queenly ten-year-old with the pinkish sun-kissed shoulders and scary diamond cat eyes,” who bullies him when they’re alone in the nearby woods.
Even more devastating are cruelties inflicted by a boy at school. The harassment grows so intense that Jeon-Gi brings a 10-inch carving knife to school one day and produces it when his antagonizer shoves him. The school suspends Jeon-Gi for the rest of the year. His behavior strikes everyone, including a lenient judge, as an aberration, given that Jeon-Gi is a “clean-cut, soft-spoken, somewhat overcourteous” kid who comes from a loving family, goes to church and is a Cub Scout.
A social worker suggests he attend a retreat sponsored by his church in upstate New York. The final two-thirds of the novel are set at that camp, an experience that includes not only standard summer-camp experiences like a crush but also traumatic episodes that linger well after summer ends.
Coming-of-age stories can be mawkish, but not Lee’s novel: It’s nuanced and dramatically rich, presenting a frighteningly accurate depiction of adolescence that offers no easy answers. A Tender Age is another powerful work about identity formation and the American experience from one of America’s best authors.