“The redness in her eyes reminded me of the lipstick she hadn’t worn in a while. I wanted to ask her out to the street vendors again, to eat skewers together, to become two jobless mindless dipshit girls wandering the city together. To feel how surely she took each footstep, how her heels smacked the ground. To be anything but who we were right now, shivering in our corridors and rooms so small that nothing ever got lost in them.”
Che Yeun’s Tailbone (Bloomsbury 2026) aches with anger, grief, want, and hunger – a bildungsroman that is as fragrant and bitter as a clementine peel. Set in Seoul in 2008, the novel is framed by a growing financial crisis. The novel follows an unnamed teenage girl who runs away from her alcoholic and abusive father and her compliant and backboneless mother. She escapes into the night, intent on disappearing, another girl lost to the bowels of Seoul.
Our unnamed narrator ends up at a cheap boarding house – full of single girls who work the streets and can’t afford anything nicer. She meets Juju, a decade older than her, and the two build a family of sorts. Our unnamed narrator craves connection and physical contact, and “tailbone to tailbone,” she gets this from Juju. When Juju finds her eating out of the trash, she insists a change be made. She teaches the teen how to take out loans in her mother’s name. Our narrator knows this action will but her mother at risk but the survival instinct is stronger than her guilt. The texts to her mother go unanswered.
The relationship with Juju is the most beautiful thing in the novel, particularly in the unspoken ways they care for each, the way they see each other, and the way they are lost together. I think we’ll see this book pop up on some longlists this year.
As a final note, this cover is absolutely perfect for the novel.
A Girl Named Tommi 