“You think you can die only once. What luck, if that’s true. I was eleven years old, and I thought I knew everything.”
Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age (Riverhead 2026) should have captured my attention a bit more than it did. I tend to love bildungsromans, and a novel about a Korean kid growing up in New York in the 1970s who gets sent to a church-run summer camp of Asian kids sounded amazing. Maybe it was me, it probably was, but this was a chore to read. I realized early on I didn’t much care for it. Eleven-year-old Jeon-Gi and the Lord of the Flies-esque playground and later summer camp never landed with this reader. (To be fair, I also didn’t enjoy Lord of the Flies.)
I enjoyed how the novel opened (though I was concerned for the dog), and I did enjoy the moments when adult Jeon-Gi interjected (even though it was inconsistent and nearly jarring when it happened), but ultimately this is a pass from me.
A Girl Named Tommi 