Description
Fleeing her 1980s Bronx family home in the wake of her unfaithful father's abandonment and her mother's mental illness, Korean teen Joon struggles through an adolescence marked by homeless shelters, addiction, and demeaning jobs.
Read More
A major voice in fiction debuts with the story of a teenage runaway on the streets of 1980s New York. Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. Joon's adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and finally toward something resembling hope.
Read Less