Five years after his last novel, Chang-rae Lee (On Such a Full Sea) delivers A Tender Age, a luminous bildungsroman about the ache to belong. Jeon-Gi finds himself "suddenly thinking about the circumstances of how our girls got our dog." Years ago, they were visiting family friends and left with a three-month-old puppy that was being abused by the family's young son. In imagining the dog's revenge on his tormentor, Jeon-Gi insists, "To dispirit a certain kind you must be malign, become as bent as your nemesis. You must shock even yourself."
From there, the narrative explores "some rough times... [that] spanned the near-year that led up to my eleventh birthday during camp in the summer of 1976." Jeon-Gi and his family live 35 minutes north of New York City. Their apartment complex is home to "legions of us new immigrants," and the children regularly congregate outside to play. But Jeon-Gi is bullied by an 11-year-old girl who weaponizes his devotion to his mother; he is provoked by a racist playmate, then relentlessly terrorized by a fellow student. Despite good friendships and supportive counselors, amid developing his first romantic feelings, that summer Jeon-Gi's increasingly uncontainable frustration pushes toward inevitable results that reverberate through lifetimes.
Lee again explores identity and acceptance, family and relationships, racism and privilege with raw intensity and biting insight, managing to write breathtaking prose through predictable mundanity but also wrenching inhumanity. He gorgeously, empathically captures Jeon-Gi's visceral struggles desperately navigating between childhood innocence and "confronting adult realities." In his masterful almost-ending, Lee shrouds what exactly happened on that life-altering precipice, brilliantly inviting room for interrogation and interpretation. --Terry Hong