Chang-rae Lee with Elaine Castillo

Chang-rae Lee, the acclaimed author of "Native Speaker," returns to Kepler’s to talk about his coming-of-age novel, "A Tender Age."
About this Event

Chang-rae Lee, the acclaimed author of Native Speaker, returns to Kepler’s to talk about his coming-of-age novel, A Tender Age.

About the Book

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.
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