The novel’s a beautiful weave of flashbacks, an inflection point grasped only with the benefit of hindsight ... It would be tempting to describe “A Tender Age” as a tender-hearted coming-of-age tale — the title practically begs readers to do so — but there’s more going on beneath its dappled surfaces. The rage of children — their frustrations with grown-ups, fury at being misunderstood, curiosity about body changes—pulses across the narrative, the ways those prepubescent energies still imprint us. His adult voice intrudes on occasion...But the overwritten bits are few ... A Tender Age expands beyond its frame, evoking the tug of memory, a philosophical novel ultimately less concerned with a pivotal moment in childhood and more with the accretion of regret and the sweep of aging itself.
Whereas Lee’s prior novels are largely transnational in scope, A Tender Age is a far more insular affair. In some ways, the book feels like a return to Native Speaker, in that it emphasizes the American of Korean American assimilation ... Lee’s novels often end with an abrupt instance of violence, working like a release valve for narrative pressure. And as Jeon-Gi’s time at summer camp unfolds, the reader is made persistently aware of some fatal crisis to come. It’s a testament to Lee’s craft that, despite such frequent and furious foreshadowing, the actual event still arrives as a shock ... The pathos of A Tender Age lies in its young protagonist’s waning ability to hold the realities of the adult world at bay ... Lee shows how a young boy’s search for how an immigrant should be can easily slip into the uneasy terrain of projection and overidentification — especially, and often hazardously, through the channels of fiction.
Sensitive ... Winning ... Lee is particularly attuned to character building ... Lee has wonderfully evoked the unmatched urgency of this period of childhood, when everything, from a footrace to a girl’s smile, feels like a matter of life and death.
Lee uses his careful prose to sink slowly and deeply into the minds of men who resist thinking about their feelings, even as they ruminate obsessively about their past griefs ... What sets A Tender Age apart is its layered narration, in which a reflective adult and resurrected child together lead the reader onward as Lee strings threats of violence through the text, building thrillerlike tension ... as the novel charts Jeon-Gi’s path toward becoming an American man, Lee dares to linger over the allure of aggression and dominance, probing rather than skirting or accepting it.
After Lee’s strikingly different novels about spies, veterans, suburbanites, war orphans, and dystopian wanderers, A Tender Age is another reminder that he’s one of the most insightful and wide-ranging authors in the country ... As someone who taught and loathed John Knowles’s A Separate Peace for several years, I wish I could go back and talk with my students about this infinitely finer novel that traces the unspeakable pain that twists around the spine even while we’re still reaching for the life ahead.
While reading Lee’s A Tender Age, I couldn’t help but think of [John] Knowles’s 1959 classic A Separate Peace ... Lee does an excellent job of capturing past-day Jeon-Gi’s youth and naivety. Simply put, little kids have big feelings ... Traditionally speaking, if an older narrator is recalling his younger self, then there should be a clear reason as to why. Idealistically speaking, the older narrator should also impart some wisdom, some reassurance that he’s matured. For Lee to have present-day Jeon-Gi offer little to no insight on how his thoughts and feelings might have changed over the last few decades not only challenges widely accepted writing conventions, but also forces the reader to ask, maybe Jeon-Gi hasn’t changed? If A Separate Peace represents an ideal story where the narrator is able to let go and heal from his childhood trauma, then maybe A Tender Age represents a tragic truth. Some people, no matter how old they get, will always be a scared, scarred child within.
This is a story about the pain and shame that often lie coiled at the heart of an otherwise unexceptional life. Unfortunately, consistently poor novelistic choices produce a largely bland, unexceptional novel, the literary equivalent of one of those dutiful Sundance social dramas that sell for a few million dollars, then disappear immediately from view. Though told retrospectively, A Tender Age has neither the vividness of memory nor the immediacy of experience ... The result is a novel that fails to capture sensation or experience, relying on page after page of description, rendered in that superfluous, conversational nonstyle far too common among contemporary American works of fiction.
Luminous ... In his masterful almost-ending, Lee shrouds what exactly happened on that life-altering precipice, brilliantly inviting room for interrogation and interpretation.
Each detail in each stunning and dramatic scene is vital and clarion, each realization of Jeon-Gi’s regarding innocence and guilt, acceptance and alienation, truth and lies, desire and envy, fear and courage are highly charged and resonant.
Coming-of-age stories can be mawkish, but not Lee’s novel: It’s nuanced and dramatically rich, presenting a frighteningly accurate depiction of adolescence that offers no easy answers. A Tender Age is another powerful work about identity formation and the American experience from one of America’s best authors.
