Chang-rae Lee, the acclaimed author of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, returns with a coming-of-age novel about a Korean American boy on the cusp of adolescence and the events of a single fateful summer. The narrator, Jeon-Gi, is eleven, the doted-upon son of working-class immigrant parents. At home he is cherished; outside, he runs with a roving pack of neighborhood kids who hold sway over a derelict baseball field, a weedy parking lot, and a rusty jungle gym, absorbed in the endless childhood business of getting into and out of trouble. Then, over the course of the summer he turns eleven, he becomes caught up in a staggering series of events whose consequences reverberate far beyond himself and his family—a collision with adult knowledge that he will turn over in his mind for the rest of his life. Lee frames the story as a classic American bildungsroman, placing Jeon-Gi in a lineage that runs from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield, but filtered through the specific experience of the child of immigrants navigating competing versions of himself. The novel is an exploration of American masculinity and family, of the moment a child first confronts questions of guilt, innocence, and his own culpability—and of the human tendency both to look squarely at such things and to look away. Written with the emotional precision and restrained lyricism that have defined Lee's work, A Tender Age captures a family and a community within reach of the American dream, and a young person standing at the threshold of adulthood as the world's complications close in around him.