A Tender Age
A Novel
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Chang-rae Lee paints a darkly profound portrait of one boy’s pivotal summer in this richly told coming-of-age novel set in 1976. At just 10 years old, Jeon-Gi deals with more physical and emotional violence on the streets of his run-down tenement apartment complex than his loving immigrant parents could imagine. Until he confronts another kid with a knife, that is. Hoping to set him on a better path, they send him to a church summer camp, where he experiences many angst-ridden firsts. But this book isn’t a wistful, nostalgic look back at a simpler time. In this gorgeously intimate character study, Lee gets into the fine, complex texture of J-G’s inner world. We can see that his ever-evolving idea of himself is painfully fragile, informed by his parents’ subtle but constant strain and the brutality of schoolyard politics. Lee’s poignantly insightful approach throughout A Tender Age makes it the kind of read that’s uncomfortable at times but always deeply rewarding.
