Debut author Che Yeun's Tailbone presents a tense, chilling portrait of a teenager's perilous journey into unprepared independence. In 2008, as the global financial crisis hits Seoul, the unnamed 17-year-old narrator is a high school senior unsure she'll graduate with her falling grades. She instead skips classes and roams "the loud, polluted streets of my childhood." Home is made miserable by her abusive father, who only comes home in an alcoholic stupor to berate her mother trapped in eternal subservience.
"I ran away for good in the stinking slop heart of summer. Away from my mother and father, but mostly my mother. She was the only creature I would miss and the only one to miss me." She leaves abruptly, becoming "just another hollow teenager bobbing along the stream of Seoul." Traveling to "one of these ghost neighborhoods" just 15 subways stations away, she enters "an unrecognizable world" where she takes a room in a women-only lodging house advertised on a flimsy billboard.
Her lies--partially aspirational--begin there as she tells the landlady that she's finished high school and is training to be a flight attendant. The older woman, too, tells stories--of better times, of inheriting the building from her parents, of a bygone neighborhood of "some really nice houses" and the "oldest persimmon trees." The current inhabitants of the dilapidated building are unmoored young women, often referred to as a single entity "girls": "what made them all the same" is that they chase dreams of glamour and love while relying on "old desperate idiot men to feed their hunger for pretty things." Juju is the one who stands out, she who "insisted on fake-colored contact lenses no matter how bloodshot her eyes became," as if life is only bearable through a filter. Juju teaches the narrator about taking out questionable loans in a parent's name--"I'd feel better about screwing [my father] over," the teen admits, but Juju insists lenders prefer mothers. Juju reluctantly cares, possibly too much, attempting to protect the teen from devolving into one of the women pulled away by "creeps and cars and nightclubs."
Yeun writes with glaring clarity, exposing a tortuous cycle of twisted hope and bleak reality, exacerbated by a sweeping financial downturn that further threatens the girls' already tenuous existence. Societal--and personal--judgment stifles these girls, already openly commodified, but Yeun hauntingly commits to amplifying their humanity, as they confess uncertainty, fight invisibility, savor fleeting moments of kindness and empathy. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Che Yeun's haunting debut novel, Tailbone, is an aching, raw portrait of an urban teen runaway's unplanned, unprepared independence.