Our score
Excellent
A Tender Age
Chang-rae Lee returns with A Tender Age, a coming-of-age novel that puts guilt inside the body of an eleven-year-old and never quite lets him set it down. It's literary fiction at its most exacting: a working-class Korean-American childhood rendered with more precision than nostalgia, and a family drawn into the fallout of one boy's summer.
From the review
Chang-rae Lee has spent his career watching what a person gives up to belong in this country, and A Tender Age hands that question to a kid too young to know he's already answering it. Jeon-Gi is eleven the summer everything changes, a Korean-American boy whose working-class parents spoil him at home and lose track of him everywhere else. Outside the house he answers to a different authority, a loose confederation of neighborhood boys who run a derelict ballfield, a weedy lot, and a rusted jungle gym like their own small country. Lee's real interest is the gap between those two worlds, and how much a child can absorb while standing right on top of it. The novel doesn't dwell on those city lots because they're picturesque. It dwells on them because they're the only place Jeon-Gi gets to be someone his parents didn't make and doesn't have to explain to them either. That freedom is real, and Lee never undercuts it with easy judgment, but he also never lets you forget what a pack of unsupervised boys can talk each other into. The rusted jungle gym is doing double duty in a way I found genuinely moving: it stands for a childhood that still has room in it for pure play, right up until the point that it doesn't.
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