A Tender Age

by Chang-rae Lee

“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?”—The Los Angeles Times

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." —Jhumpa Lahiri

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.


A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Coming Of Age, Historical Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Aapi

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 11, 2026

About the author

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up in 1970’s outside of NYC, a Korean American boy , Jeon-Gi comes of age. A different boy on the street playing ball and trying to be tough than on the good son at home . Bullying and a misled response leads to profound questions of identity, morality and experiences that he seems too young to have to endure. Questions about his choices go unanswered at times both to him and to the reader . Dark at times this is told by Jeon-Gi as an adult looking back at his 11 year old self, remembering clearly the forces around him - the peer pressure to be tough, the typical preteen angst of one’s first crush , the cultural influence reflected by the Korean immigrant experience, his family. It is his time at a summer church camp that Jeon-Gi discovers some of who he is. A moving and relevant story.

I received a copy of this from Riverhead through NetGalley.

[emma]

this one's for the bildungsroman stans

[Liz Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tender Age won't be for every reader, but this book knocked me out in the best way. Our protagonist, Jeon-Gi, is what appears to be a fairly successful adult looking back with sharp precision to who he was at ten years old. He describes trying to make sense of it all as futilely scratching an itch. This entire novel is the reader watching him try to scratch that itch. I wanted to look away, but simply couldn't. 

Ten is such a tender age. Everything is delicate. Even more so for Jeon-Gi whose immigrant parents see him one way that is different from how he sees himself and different from how he presents to peers. He takes us through several truly pivotal moments during this year of his life where his own culpability in incidents is something he has clearly spent decades examining, with no end in sight. We get inside his brain as he contemplates what we know is American Masculinity ((but he doesn't yet), what makes adults tick, and the unintended consequences of reinventing oneself. 
 
Chang-rae Lee has given us such an important addition to the American Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age literary genre focusing on a protagonist's psychological, moral, or social growth from youth to maturity, and my favorite genre). This is one of those books where you just KNOW ten years down the line you will still recall, with a lot of detail, certain parts of the novel. Lee can make something as innocuous as a burnt stew feel like the end of the world in the same way some of the more wild plot points/10 year old decision making do. 

While I wanted to spend a bit more time with Jeon-Gi exploring his current self, that isn't what Lee is doing here. This was uncomfortable and powerful and an absolute stand out to my reading year.

[Zea · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is an odd one! i really enjoyed the writing and there are certain episodes that particularly stood out to me, but the structure is perplexingly imbalanced in a way that makes the whole project feel unfinished. the concluding section in particular seems like something that ought to have been at the center of the novel, and the actual final pages are awfully quick, almost like the novel wants to get away before you’ve noticed what it’s done. there’s definitely some boy stuff here too.. describe a girl without describing her boobs etc… and don’t get me started on the point of telling!



*arc provided by netgalley!*

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bildungsroman of a Korean American boy, as reflected on by his future, adult self. Definitely appeals to my nostalgia for the pre-internet days. Explores immigrant life, friendship frictions, masculinity, culpability.

[Kristen W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

i went to summer camp and read a book about going to summer camp

[Lydia Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of A Tender Age. Chang-rae Lee drops us into the confused inner world of Jeon-Gi, a Korean-American boy growing up in the 1970s, caught between his immigrant parents’ world at home and the pack of kids he runs with outside. I really enjoyed the first half. The second half was personally timely as my family had just gotten back from doing a family camp together, but it lingered too long in a liminal space that never quite resolved for me. I tend to be more drawn to plot driven books, and this one tested that patience by the end.

[Salty Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entering his teens, Jeon-Gi is a sensitive boy who's brought up in a Korean household in NYC in the 70s. Through early contacts with a few rough friends, he learns about reality of life. Summer camp one year proves to be a pivotal point. It's here that Jeon-Gi learns the meaning of true friendship, first attraction and ultimately violence. The boy's reckoning is a challenging one, but it's one that makes this novel such a pleasure to read.

[Tia Billig · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

a haunting story honestly

some parts in the middle drew me out of the story for a little bit, but worth it for the ending. raw and real writing

oddly enough, one that will keep me up at night for a bit

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of A Tender Age had me captivated. The writing is excellent and I was invested in JG’s story. Things took a turn when he goes to camp and the rest of the novel felt like a play-by-play of camp life. It also became what I call a “boy novel” even though I don’t like gendering art. There was a preoccupation with genitalia and experimenting with drugs and booze and sex. I understand that’s true for the age, but it didn’t do anything to further the plot or theme. The end was so abrupt and there wasn’t a resolution typical of a bildungsroman novel like this. I was disappointed.

[Teri Brewer]

Not for me

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Chrissy Vaughn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - Pub date Aug 11, 2026
Blown away by Lee's skillful and emotional writing -- such a talent. The description from the publisher hits pretty spot on RE: this one: "Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life."

I used this book for my "Hard-to-Love Protagonist" Book Bingo square. The complexity of the narrator's young self has us vacillating between rooting for an oft-bullied underdog to cringing at an evll kid with potentially psychopathic rage issues. I docked 1.5 stars for the disjointed connections between the various parts of the story, some plots holes that made the story feel a little unrealistic to me, and an ending that felt rushed.

++++
Thanks to NetGalley and Riverhead Books for this eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

[Devon Flaherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee is best read with a buddy. Not like while you’re reading it, but it’s the kind of book you want to discuss after (and while) you read. I guess that makes it a good book club read. But since it’s being published today, it might be awhile before it shows up on your book club’s radar. I suppose you could just read bits of it aloud to your husband and make him listen to your thoughts about it, even though he hasn’t read it. Not quite as satisfying. (I should know.)


I was holding my opinion close to my chest on this one until I reached the end. Why? Because part of its power is a deftly held tension, so subtle and so visceral, and I wanted to know if Lee would deliver on it. I would say the ending is okay. (It’s a little whiplash-y.) It’s the rest of the book—the meat of it—that is really going to stick with me for a long time.

Blurb: Jeong-Gi (J.-G.) is barreling into prepubescence in the 70s in a mixed-ethnicity apartment complex outside New York City. He is a Korean immigrant, a kid who doesn’t even fit in with a band of misfits. And man does he have some stuff going on in his head, let alone a terrible propensity for bad luck. Plus, these are the tween years, in all their violence and confusion, self-discovery and naivety. And when he makes a hot-headed choice that sends his future down a new and alarming path, the terror only multiplies, and J.-G. Has to ask himself, is he a bad person?

This story is told through the voice of J.-G. as a grown man, looking like a pretty usual married dude with kids. (We are given glimpses into the future whenever we might get distracted from the real story by wondering about a particular character who isn’t J.-G.) This is one of two things that didn’t work so well for me. Because of this perspective, it reads like a memoir, but there were so many details that no one would ever be able to recall, that those details pulled me out of the world for a second, broke the fourth wall. And then I would wish that Lee had just told it like “normal,” so I could absorb the omniscient viewpoint and know it as fiction, just very realistic fiction (based on Lee’s life, somewhat, from what I have heard). But then I would wonder what that could look like. Like I said earlier, I think Lee used this narrative choice to keep us focused on the now of the story, the narrow focus of one kid’s tween years, not what’s going to happen in the future. It’s a tough one.

The other thing that didn’t work amazingly for me, and I could see others complaining about: the pacing. Or the story structure. This is literary fiction, and it treads forward relentlessly through the events Rube Goldbery-style that lead to the final pages. These scenes are often memorable, often nostalgic, and always carry a sense of anxiety for the reader, some more than others. Some are also a little brutal. (Maybe too brutal now and again?) But when I was hitting his camp summer at 40-something per cent through the book (I was given an ARC through NetGalley), I was like, that’s an odd time to feel like we’re hitting our stride. 40% of the book is set-up? Multiple inciting incidents padded with tons of detail filler? I’m not gonna hate on it, because in the end I really appreciated this book. But it’s sure gonna turn some people off and it made it harder for me to get through. Now if it had actually been a memoir, all those little stories that took forever to build up would have made sense because they actually happened and contribute. But as a fictional narrative? Kinda strange choices, I think. Lee could have shrunk time and the number of characters to get us to camp much sooner, which is where I feel like things took off.

But within these “complaints” that keep the book from being a five for me, I hope you noticed all the compliments I paid it. It is memorable. The themes are deftly handled. I found the narrator to be unreliable in the most believable of ways and want to argue with all the reviews (already) that take him at his word regarding his opinion of himself. The writing style is both sparse and poetic, like free verse poetry can be. I was right there inside his neighborhood, his school, the camp, etc., but also completely engulfed in this kid’s head. I rarely left the perspective of a ten- and eleven-year old boy, but a very (almost too) accurate perspective. It made me wonder: if I were shoved back into the brain and life of my young self, would it be this confusing and fraught and shattered and full? I am leaning towards yes.

Sure, Lee is concentrating on the negative things more than the positive, but J.-G.’s life isn’t the easiest one to navigate. Mine was simpler, I’m pretty sure. But it’s also the nature of childhood, at least at this stage in it. I think of my own daughter starting middle school at a fancy school and all of a sudden it was like anarchy. Who were these kids? Why couldn’t they be wrangled or contained anymore? They were smelly, wild, underhanded, and a little scary. Isn’t that what it’s like? It’s a bumpy ride when you and all your peers are figuring out what sort of people you want to be and are. There is a lot of experimentation, and some of that would cause great shame now if you really put it under a microscope.

Whatever. I should chill and let you read it. I enjoyed this book for its writing style and for its really making me think. Also, for giving me these creepy/tense vibes the whole time while also being nostalgic. I would recommend it, especially for more literary-leaning book clubs. When it hits paperback, I’ll be recommending it to some of mine. And as for all the bildungsroman comparisons, yeah, I agree, it is a great addition to this tradition—in some ways more honest than many of them. Or at least an intriguing new perspective, despite some rather squirmy scenes (one in particular and you’ll know it the second you get there).

P.S. He might have overdone the use of the word “tender.” But love the plethora of food.

***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST BLOG***

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeon-Gi, a middle-aged man whose daughters are out of the house that he now shares with only his wife and dog, recalls “those tender ages rife with curiosities” in Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee’s stirring coming-of-age novel. Jeon-Gi reflects back to the summer of 1976, the year that led up to his eleventh birthday during summer camp. Jeon-Gi played unsupervised with a revolving gang of kids in the suburban, “run-down, urban-style tenements” of Cove Gardens in New York. He remembers that the kids would lob racist and ethnic slurs at each other that they didn’t fully understand, but he also remembers the bullying. He recalls being humiliated and debased by Katie Crocker, who made Jeon-Gi spew a litany of profanity at his beloved mother. But, he rationalizes as an adult, that “[t]o be a kid was to be bullied, no exceptions.” He was also physically threatened with razor-sharp Ninja stars by the menacing Tommy Reilly (who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia) which caused Jeon-Gi to bring a 10-inch carving knife to school in his backpack for self-defense leading to his suspension for the balance of his fifth grade year. What Jeon-Gi cannot fathom as an adult is why he never told anyone about Tommy Reilly when it was known by the school administration that he had been terrorizing other students with a pellet gun. Because his conduct was uncharacteristic, Jeon-Gi was sentenced to a diversion program where he met with various counselors, social workers, and spent the day with hardened convicts in scenes out of “Scared Straight.”

In the summer, Jeon-Gi was handed over by his devoted but concerned parents to a Korean church camp, Camp Charminster. His counselor, the avuncular Benjamin Frost, was the first young white man Jeon-Gi was going to get to know and the prospect was “thrilling.” He was also delighted to have “straight-up American food” with no Asian dishes. At camp, Jeon-Gi felt appreciated and trusted. He experimented with his persona by telling misleading and phony facts to adults and other kids to see how the information would land, including exaggerating his relationship with Cleon Washington, a royal of the playground who patterned his style to Julius Irving. There was a first crush on the Susan Sun, a “force of nature” from Staten Island and trying cigarettes filched from a counselor’s backpack. Jeon-Gi considered his time at Charminster one of “the very best things in my life” although even camp had its share of bullies, like Dickens Rho, the “impressive boy” with the wavy hair; a “conceited, albeit handsome, jerk.” The consequential climax explains why Jeon-Gi is preoccupied with the notion that he “might be the kind of person certain bad things happen to.”

Lee has crafted a sensitive and accurate portrayal of prepubescence “[a]n age where you have little control over your life.” This story caused me to reflect on my own camp experiences, and I was surprised that I can still recall the name of the girl who tormented me by repeatedly pushing me off the trampoline. I also remember that because I was a strong swimmer, I was able to participate in the races in the lake, like Jeon-Gi who passed the deep water test and could race in Trench Lake with its deep drop-off. Lee’s core themes of struggling with self-worth and social acceptance and identity are universal. I adored this novel. Thank you Riverhead and Net Galley for an advance copy of this highly anticipated release that exceeded my very high expectations.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up with two older brothers did not teach me about the inner lives of prepubescent boys, nor was I terribly perceptive about the opposite sex at that age. I was too busy trying to figure out my girlhood. Tentatively, I waded into Chang-rae Lee’s novel about a ten-year-old Korean-American boy and his immigrant parents in the 1970s. I trusted the author, a savvy and subtle writer of identity and exile. He did not disappoint!

It took me a good minute to appreciate the vicissitudes of Jeon-Gi’s life, but once I understood the stakes, I was fully engaged. Besides identity—(both self and ethnic within American culture), the themes include family, friendship, alienation, and the dilemmas of American masculinity. And overriding these themes was the challenge of communication, both of language skills and the willingness to share your deepest feelings.

After a nearly violent encounter with a peer at school, J.-G. enters the juvenile legal system. These were the youthful days of being bullied and also bullying. Since he rarely shared inner struggles with his parents, J.-G. chose not to explain why he threatened another student with a knife on school grounds. He was remanded to attend a program for juvenile delinquents, and the face-to-face with some antisocial criminals leads to distressing, even shocking behaviors for someone his age to witness. These turbulent times.

A Tender Age captures less than a year in J.-G.’s life, but it was a pivotal period of growth, especially during the weeks of summer overnight camp. There were boys and girls (kept in separate quarters), and more Korean American kids than in the play yard at home. His first adult hero and his first crush happen here, and he learned outdoor skills that help build his confidence. Camp life was a liminal time for J.-G.--to make independent decisions and achieve a level of self-recognition.

J.-G.’s parents were loving and aimed to guide him toward success, but they often needed their son to interpret English for them, as their language skills were limited. Lee didn’t use a hammer to clarify the immigrant experience; rather, he let it unfold organically. J.-G.’s superpower and Achilles heel was his ability to mask his true feelings. Girls are known to be practiced in masking, but certainly J.-G. had an enigmatic coping style. That was his way of navigating the troubling mixed feelings and inner confusion of his age.

The inner struggles of family often occur privately, quietly, and the novel is a blend of action and some powerful interior moments. The story is recounted by an adult Jeon-Gi, fine-tuned like a memoir would be, revealing this charged year of his life. Lee’s character ably brought the reader into his youth, balancing the perspective of an adult reckoning with potent events from childhood with the boy winging his way through the tumult of this tender age. In a lesser author, this would have been maladroit. In Lee’s hands, the strength of his writing strapped me in.

“A primary struggle of childhood is the struggle to make oneself understood, but I found a special power in being indecipherable, leaving everyone grasping and unsettled.”

The strength of this book continues to awe me, the intricate threads still tangling with each other long after the last page. Thank you to Riverhead publishers for providing me with an ARC.

[LLJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

My gratitude to #NetGalley and to #RiverheadBooks for the opportunity to read and review this wonderful novel by #ChangRaeLee which is due for publication on 8.11.2026.

Despite hearing wonderful things about this Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, #ATenderAge was my first experience reading him and I'm looking forward to more. I requested this book based upon his acclaimed literary status and was not disappointed.

"A Tender Age" was highly readable in an intimate and personal way that had me doublechecking the NetGalley portal (about fifty pages in) to make sure it was not a memoir. It is not, but it felt like one. That is a unique experience for me and feels important to mention.

Lee's creation of his main character, a Korean-American Jeon-Gi, is remarkable. We meet him in the modern day reflecting upon a pivotal section of his childhood -- we see J - G from about age 9 through his very memorable 10th and 11th birthdays -- and some especially character-shaping experiences he has in school and in his neighborhood, among the seemingly feral local children in his neighborhood (some more impactful than others). We witness the reverence he has for his parents (especially his mother who remains the "most beautiful" woman in the world) and right before his 11th birthday he is sent to a church camp where he spends two powerful weeks. The combination of these people, places, and events move him from sheltered innocence to a forever-changed witness (and participant) in trauma (his own and a handful of people around him).

I want to avoid spoilers and recanting specific scenes but J - G moves quietly from a passive role to an "actor" in his life (in many definition of the word) and Lee does an incredible job demonstrating how -- regardless of protective parents, of hugging the sidelines, of whatever powers we employ to either move closer or further away from desired (or undesired outcomes -- life/fate has a way of pulling us, humans, into the river of events - for better and for worse.

Life shapes us and we shape one another -- the interconnection is undeniable. And for a young assimilating immigrant boy within a diverse neighborhood, certain factors arise that may not apply to others around him. In reality, how we look, speak, the foods we eat, our parents, all of these things steer the ways things evolve and I was fascinated by the character of J - G and how he relied on storytelling, like many of us do, to matter more and to fit in. How the lengths he went to impacted the lives of those around him. Human life unfolds in waves of choices and regrets, bitterness and forgiveness, serendipity and tragedy.

This coming-of-age story is a must-read, beautifully written, and it was impossible for me not to feel compassion toward the main character though some of the choices he made were terrible (they were also, for me, mostly understandable). I highly recommend "A Tender Age" and am looking forward to reading more by this talented writer.

[Carm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unsupervised hellscape of a Gen X childhood is brutal enough on its own. A Tender Age complicates it further through the lens of immigrant family life.

Lee portrays both with a level of emotional weight that feels invasive at times, not in the sense of innocence lost, but in the dirtier reality of becoming a person before you fully understand yourself. This is a novel about the formation of shame. About the way a child begins to internalize mistreatment, misread the world around him, and slowly construct an identity out of fear, humiliation, longing and self-preservation.

Jeon-Gi is an exceptional narrator. Observant. Wounded. Earnest. Often wiser than his years in a manner that feels deliberately retrospective rather than unbelievably precocious. Through him, Lee explores masculinity not as a set of abstract rules but as something boys teach each other through dominance, peer hostility, performance and the constant pressure to understand what kind of “man” the world expects them to be. The novel is acutely attuned to the lessons humiliation imparts, the behaviors violence and status hierarchies reward, and the way children learn power and cruelty long before they have the words to articulate either. Sexuality is also rendered with remarkable honesty, not as an awakening in any romanticized sense, but as curiosity, embarrassment and misunderstanding tangled up in ways that feel true to adolescence.

What makes this novel so compelling is its refusal to reduce any of this into easy moral lessons. Jeon-Gi is neither pure victim nor villain. He is morally and self-consciously altered by the forces shaping him, but he remains a boy. Lee understands that childhood is often where we first encounter the terrifying possibility that we can be harmed by the world while also being capable of harming others. This wasn't the story of one damaged child. This was a whole ecosystem that produced boys like him.

A Tender Age digs deep into memory, degradation and the way we reinterpret our own past to make sense of who we become. It is equally interested in exposing the reality that adults have secret lives, break rules and are not always what they present themselves to be.

Thank you to Riverhead Books and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest feedback. Reading this was an actual privilege. I loved every second I spent with it. A five star BANGER. One of my favorite books of the year. One of my favorite books, period.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early review copy.

Profoundly moving and quietly disturbing.

Only Chang-Rae Lee could write this story.  It is simultaneously nostalgic, unsettling, and compelling (and a bit disgusting).   Although the pace is slow, I was riveted.  I am left with such a profound sense of loss, now that I have finished.  This is one of those books that subsumes the reader, and when you are finished, you feel confused, unsure what to do next.  How do I carry on now that I am done reading this remarkable novel?

This is absolutely not the type of book I would normally read. The only reason I picked it up is because I trust Chang-Rae Lee to write a story worth reading. Trust = fulfilled!

In some ways more disturbing than My Year Abroad, because that story was outlandish (if haunting) and this story feels relatable.  Maybe this wasn't MY childhood story, but I feel like it easily could have happened to someone I know, since, although I am not Korean-American, Jeon-Gi and I are age-mates.  Ten is a tender age, but it is also a brutal age.  Lee has drilled down to the slimy unpleasant nugget that hides inside of all of us: the cruelty, the unpleasant impulses, the intrusive thoughts, the yearning, the fear, the braggadocio, the confusion, the unending desire to be liked warring with the desire to lash out.

In many ways, this is just like every other Lee book I've read:  he shines an unflinching light on our inner hearts, whether it's a young woman traveling in a near future dystopian, or a retired landscaper flying his plane over Long Island, or a middle aged man remembering the war, or a young man on an outlandish international trip.  But this also feels like a departure. I've never read a book from him that focuses so relentlessly on a child's POV.  Naturally, Lee excels at this, just as he excels at every other portrayal he's tackled in his time.   And, truly, every book he's written has been a departure.  He is always surprising us.

This would be an amazing novel to discuss in a university class or a book club.  I am left with so many thoughts!  I'm sure every reader will feel that way, but we will all have different thoughts.  Not every reader will love this book, but every reader will have something to say.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happy Pub Day to A Tender Age! In this novel, we get an up-close-and-personal look at our main character, Jeon-Gi, as he reflects on a formative summer when he was just a chubby 10-year-old boy living in the suburbs of New York.

At 10, you are still clinging to the naivety of childhood while also dealing with the awkwardness of prepubescence and grappling with your identity outside of your nuclear family. Like a bug immortalized in amber, Lee captures those innocent yet intense feelings—and the often misguided thought processes—of youth with remarkable fidelity. The playground scenes and various character dynamics were not, in themselves, particularly significant, but Lee renders them with such astounding clarity and depth that every detail takes on a poignancy befitting Jeon-Gi’s childhood tunnel vision.


^ I was punted back to my own childhood and embraced by a warm nostalgia every time I picked up this book. Jeon-Gi's loss of innocence was gradual but unmistakeable, brought to life by Lee's dimensional, authentic, and, let's face it, tender writing, which made this bildungsroman truly triumph.

Lee also incorporates Jeon-Gi’s relationship with his parents, both Korean immigrants, allowing the novel to explore his coming-of-age through the lens of being Korean American. There are familiar anecdotes that we've seen in other immigrant stories, such as Jeon-Gi occasionally serving as a translator for his parents, but Lee handles these experiences with enough nuance that they never veer into stereotype, or steal the spotlight from Jeon-Gi's larger character arc.

For a book that dedicated a lot of real estate to elaborating on quotidian details, I found the ending to be almost suspiciously vague and abrupt. I wanted more details on current-day J.G., and how that summer impacted him. Why was he thinking about this summer decades later? Also, on principle, the title of the book should only be mentioned once in the book—like an Easter egg—and I counted it twice, which felt gimmicky and anti-climactic. Regardless, after My Year Abroad was an unfortunate DNF for me, Lee's new book made a strong comeback and fully earned its spot on my list of recommendations.

A HUGE thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this as an advanced reader copy!

[Paula W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Riverhead Books and Edelweiss for the digital review copy of A Tender Age. Their generosity did not influence my review.

I marked the entire review as containing spoilers. So, let’s talk about A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee, the book that will get a lot of 3-star reviews saying it’s boring and a lot of 5-star reviews saying it’s brilliant. Who’s right?

Objectively, the marketing team over at Riverhead books has provided us with a first person narrative coming-of-age-story, a man looking back at the defining summer he turned eleven, “from the minor scrapes of youth to larger questions of truth, goodness, and guilt.”

Insert the “It’s a trap!” meme from that Star Wars film because the narrator might seem to be relating the universal confusion of the pre-adolescent years and the devastation of a first crush, but he’s a dirty liar. He tells us so several times.

This is a full-blown villain origin story, you guys.

The main character, Jeon-Gi, is what I call a Generation 1.5X-er. He’s caught in the ultimate double-whammy of the 1970s—he's a 1.5-generation immigrant who moved here from Korea as a small child, and he's pure Gen X. His immigrant mother’s struggle with the language barrier and the hallmarks of a Gen X childhood — the lack of supervision and guidance, particularly for those in the lower middle class due to overemployed, checked out parents — are manipulated and used as camouflage to get what he wants. And to the reader he gives us relatable childhood experiences like the struggle to fit in, the first crush, and the camp blunders to garner sympathy with one hand while the other hand is dropping a match on all of it because fire is pretty.

Anyway, please read this immediately. I need lots of other people to read it so we can all be miserable together—but, like, in a really good way. 4.5/5

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age is narrated in the voice of Jeon-Gi (J.-G.), a mildly successful middle aged man, remembering his life as a ten and eleven year old in 1976. His immigrant family envelopes J.-G.: his father works with amputees as a physiotherapist, his mother remains home, and his younger sister. They live in a suburb near New York City, in a small housing development with ”Blacks and Puerto Ricans, working-class Irish and Italians, and some Jews who hadn’t yet moved on, plus the legions of us new immigrants, from Asia and Eastern Europe and the Caribbean.” J.-G.’s voice is alternatively naive, confused, painfully uncertain of himself, and weirdly self-confident. J.-G. is a serial prevaricator, liar, and fabulist. He ”tell[s] a skyful of misleading and phony facts and anecdotes that individually were unremarkable but if seen all together comprised an obnoxious constellation.”. J.-G. is also intermittently, unpredictably, and spontaneously violent.

A Tender Age is dominated by two episodes in which J.-G. erupts into baffling violence. In the first episode he retaliates against racist name-calling by a Jewish friend. With J.-G. wielding a ”a stainless steel carving knife with a plastic cream-colored handle, the blade at least ten inches long and double edged on one side with a wavy, scalloped finish, the other a jagged, geometrical toothing like a lumberjack ‘s saw” against Joshua Messing’s neck, the violence could have become disastrous. While it didn’t, J.-G. is launched into New York’s juvenile justice system with older, tougher kids. J.-G.’s violence transforms him: ”I was a boy, yes, but a boy who had traveled in secret with breathtaking speed through an unimaginable scale of space and time and ended up back in his familiar rooms a totally different creature.”. In his second violent episode, J.-G.’s romantic disappointment sparks jealousy, humiliation, and followed by a spontaneous, vicious, and near deadly act against a campmate who he barely knows.

Chang-Rae Lee avoids easy answers for J.-G.’s violence. He loves his parents and his sister, who in turn love and support him. He’s smart and well-liked by his friends. He’s a fine student and reasonably athletic. The appeal of A Tender Age lies in the seeming mystery of J.-G.’s superficially inexplicable behavior, and his adult reflections on his childhood, family, and life. Lee does provide some easy-to-miss explanations. Towards the beginning of A Tender Age, in a brief paragraph that’s easily forgettable on first reading, J.-G. explains: ’’My mother was an innately sturdy, resolute person, but living in a foreign place with few friends and no other family and not speaking the language was steadily dissolving a vital part of her. This was one thing I was painfully aware of, even then. How surprisingly fragile she was, collapsible. As such I was constantly afraid for her, which made me afraid, too, the fear forming me to be a sometimes-brutal little boy. My brutality was the colder variety, the kind that you had to peer closely to see but that was startling when you did.” And another, later clue, when a juvenile court judge almost whispers to J.-G. at his sentencing: ’’. . . ‘[L]et me tell you one thing, young man.’ She leaned close enough that I could smell both her fetching eau de toilette and the pepperoni pizza she’s had for lunch. ‘Don’t always think yourself to be so great.’”

J.-G.’s mother love in A Tender Age brought to mind Portnoy’s Complaint. Portnoy’s complaints and J.-G.’s violence shock the reader. But where Roth dangles in front of us the well-spring of Portnoy’s complaints, Chang-Rae Lee, with great subtlety, leaves us to largely unravel for ourselves the sources of J.-G.’s disastrous violence.

A Tender Age is simultaneously touching, horrifying, and sad. A second reading confirmed that it’s a novel that will remain with me and that bears yet a third rereading, hoping to understand the confounding J.-G. better and to learn whether the brutal, violent, lying prepubescent boy grows into a secreted brutal, violent, lying adult man.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Riverhead Books for providing me with an advanced reader’s copy of this fine novel.

Five stars

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An historical novel - faux memoir - that follows a 12 year old Korean-American boy, Jeon-Gi, growing up in a town north of NYC in the 1970s and which falls into the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) genre.

Jeon-Gi must navigate cliques, street fights, his mother’s expectations and learn what it means to be Korean and American. He’s torn between competing ideas of himself at home and with his peers. At home he’s doted in, outside he’s bullied and ridiculed. His parents send him to a Korean summer camp. There he experiences a series of firsts: a first crush, first serious friendships, a first glimpse of mating, and the first taste of independence. With these firsts come botched attempts as might be expected, but these are not presented as humorous, rather with a deep “emotional fragility,”. Then Jeon-Gi does something that “he had no thought” of that results in his expulsion from the camp.

This is a grim story. It focuses heavily on how Jeon-Gi is treated by others - prepare yourself for some awfulness. Jeon-Gi becomes convinced he’s just someone to whom bad things happen. With this gruesome thought hovering over him, Jeon-Gi’s character shows how such thinking can impact a life.

This is a character-driven novel. It’s a study of what can happen becoming Americanized when you are an immigrant - in our current white supremacist world, the expectation is the immigrant must preserve that world; other cultural norms aren’t white enough. Jeon-Gi is treated terribly by our white world.

My thanks to NetGalley and Riverhead Books for granting me access to this ARC.

[Elena L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about a Korean American Jeon-Gi, who reflects on his eleven-year-old self as a particular event reverberates for his whole life.

Echoing themes of identity, immigrant experience, mental health, family, forgiveness and human desires, the story is laden with layers of sadness as one dives into Jeon-Gi's deep consciousness, shaped by culture and life and enhanced by Lee's poetic prose. Through the accurate depiction of mundane, Lee exposes life's brutality, when things seem to be collapsing while Jeon-Gi embarks on a journey of flounder and self-discovery anchored by guilt and damage to its innocence.

It took me some time to get into it, as if it knew that I needed time to digest all the natural responses. The pages show how little control we have over our lives, sustaining the intensity of our rage that is smartly balanced by the sharp social commentary. The strong narrative conveys the author's intention, however, certain parts worked better for me than others and some loose sections detracted from my full engagement.

As relevant as it is unsettling, A TENDER AGE is a coming-of-age story that will demand a lot from the reader. This is my first Chang-rae Lee and I now understand all the praise (next to the backlist).

“A primary struggle of childhood is the struggle to make oneself understood, but I found a special power in being indecipherable, leaving everyone grasping and unsettled.”

[ I received an ARC from the publisher - Riverhead books . All opinions are my own ]

[Shasta Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher, author and NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A Tender Age follows Jeon-Gi as an active 11-year old Korean-American boy growing up in the suburbs outside of New York City. He comes of age as a son of Korean immigrants, caught between two languages and two cultures; and, as a playground urchin with other neighborhood kids constantly sizing each other up and looking for the odd one out to bully and antagonize. The story is told through Jeon-Gi's sharp memories as a middle-aged man as he chronicles his adolescent bouts with hypermasculinity and violence.

I rarely read about the inner lives of pre-pubescent boys, and after Catcher in the Rye, I don't think a lot of other readers seek those kinds of stories. Nonetheless, A Tender Age has placed itself as a lead story for the American bildungsroman as Lee provides an account of a liminal period in life for his narrator, but what was also a pivotal moment of growth and development.

At turns, the story is often harrowing as we encounter Jeon-Gi's rapid loss of innocence but there are moments of levity as he struggles to make sense of the world around him and draws hilarious conclusions that, well, only a 10 or 11 year old would make. I don't think this is a story for every reader, but for me, it will stick around in my memory for awhile and I look forward to annotating my own physical copy again and again in the years to come.

[Alicia Garcia-Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fictional masterpiece on childhood, A Tender Age, should be recommended reading for young men who are coming of age, and who are having a tough time of it. Young Jeon-Gi, in his 10th and 11th years in this story, is suffering the typical growing pains of traversing that narrow ledge between boyhood and manhood. He doesn't see himself as typical though, as those who are smack dab in the throes of adolescence never do. His angst is daily and profound. He sees himself as part of the whole and yet, at the same time, separate and distinct. He sees himself as bumbling, awkward, and unlucky, and yes, he is all of these things, but no more so than anyone else. The author really captures that hopeless feeling of the pre-teen years in which you often feel as you are the only person who doesn't have it all together. J-G (as his friends call him) feels like a loner even as he is smack dab in the middle of all the action. He feels anti-social even when he is craving social engagement. Through his playing outside with his friends (and enemies), his budding affection for a young girl, and trying to decide what role he is supposed to play in his family dynamic, J-G feels at once both lost and found. I held my breath many times in this book, praying that he would make the right choice in seemingly precarious situations. Note: He often didn't. Wonderful book--Highly recommend. **I received this ARC for free, but all opinions are my own.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tender Age follows Jeon-Gi, a 10-year-old Korean American boy, growing up in New York in the 1970s, told from his perspective as an adult looking back on an eventful year of his childhood.

Lee's writing is beautiful and incredibly precise, taking big, complicated feelings and articulating the very specific emotions within them. He captures all of the confusing feelings of figuring out what it means to be both a man and an Asian American during this time with such accuracy.

I especially related to the divide between Jeon-Gi's home life and the world outside of it—the mixed feelings of love and shame toward his parents and the pull to maintain Korean traditions, all while navigating the messiness of the neighborhood pack of kids, where sports and prowess dominate and the rules and social code need to be figured out. Lee captures these dynamics masterfully, from the constantly shifting center of power to the confusion and desperation that can come from trying to achieve and maintain it. Just how far will one go?

Because the story is told from the perspective of an adult looking back, I never had to wonder about whether Jeon-Gi survived adolescence. However, several of his choices left me questioning not only his character as a child, but who he would eventually become as an adult. By the end, I found it a bit frustrating not knowing how his life turned out.

This is a thoughtful coming-of-age story for readers interested in inner worlds and complicated feelings—especially anyone who grew up straddling two cultures, or who remembers the specific brutality of trying to fit in as a kid.

Personally, I grew up during this time, and being able to relate on another level made this story resonate that much more. Ultimately, Lee's precision and skill in articulating complicated feelings that often go unsaid is what will stay with me.

Thank you to Riverhead Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Xiibalba · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars.

Chang-rae Lee writing about an eleven year old Korean American boy in a New Jersey summer is the kind of literary fiction I'll always show up for, and this one earned it. Jeon-Gi lives two lives that barely touch: at home his working class immigrant parents adore him and expect the world, outside he's one of a pack of kids ruling a dead baseball field, a weedy parking lot and a rusty jungle gym. That gap is the whole engine of the book and Lee never overexplains it, he just lets you feel the boy switching languages, switching selves.

Then something happens that summer, and the rest of the novel is about a kid standing right at the edge of adult knowledge, looking straight at what he did or didn't do and then looking away, and then thinking about it for the next forty years. Lee writes that flinch beautifully. The prose is precise without being cold, and the childhood sections have that specific overheated summer quality where boredom and cruelty live in the same afternoon.

The quarter point I'm holding back is pacing. There are passages where the retrospective adult voice hovers a bit too long over what the boy already showed us, and I wanted it to trust the scene more. Small thing though. Mostly this is a book about guilt that refuses to hand you absolution, and I've been turning it over in my head for days.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC.

I really enjoyed this coming-of-age story. As an Asian American, born here and growing up in the 70s and 80s myself, I found a lot to relate to. The identity issues Jeon-Gi has are a common struggle for all of us who are the children of immigrants. We all feel a need to assimilate to the dominant culture, trying to fit in with friends and peers while simultaneously having intergenerational and cultural conflict with our parents.

J-G is also trying to figure out his role as a boy / young man in this society. He gets in trouble a couple of different times, once at school and once at church camp, both times because he thinks he has to prove something to someone else.

We get enough of his ten-year-old inner monologue to understand what he's done, but not quite enough to understand WHY he did those things, which is a little bit frustrating. It might be because J-G himself doesn't really know.

Those around him - friends, counselors, parents - present interesting foils for him. We as readers can see clearly who the morally correct people are, and who the bad influences are, but J-G doesn't.

The writing is beautiful and the main character is complex. Very enjoyable despite having a somewhat nebulous ending and message. Four stars!

[Michael Godwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tender Age is a deeply affecting coming-of-age novel that explores childhood, family, immigrant identity, guilt, innocence, and the complicated process of becoming aware of the adult world. Through the perspective of eleven-year-old Jeon-Gi, Chang-rae Lee captures the confusion of a young person caught between the security of family life and the unpredictable world beyond it.

What makes the novel particularly compelling is its exploration of American masculinity and belonging through a child's limited but increasingly perceptive understanding of his surroundings. Jeon-Gi's relationships with his working-class immigrant parents and his neighborhood friends create a vivid portrait of childhood, while the events of one transformative summer force him to confront consequences far beyond what he can initially comprehend. The emotional weight comes from watching innocence gradually give way to awareness.

Readers who appreciate literary fiction, coming-of-age stories, immigrant narratives, Asian American fiction, family dramas, and psychologically nuanced explorations of identity should find A Tender Age especially rewarding. Its themes of memory, culpability, adolescence, masculinity, and the American dream provide substantial material for book clubs and literary discussion, while Jeon-Gi's perspective gives the novel an intimate and memorable emotional center.