Authors: Nami Mun
ISBN-13: 9781616846916, ISBN-10: 1616846917
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: December 2008
Edition: Bargain
Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. She has worked as a door-to-door Avon Lady, a dance hostess, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal investigator. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she garnered a Hopwood Award for fiction and the Farrar Prize. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
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.
With the addiction memoir frequently trumping the novel for depths of degradation and despair, where can the fiction writer go with such a story? In her first novel, Mun…takes a spare, unsentimental path…Joon's is a familiar story, but it's fresh enough here to catch the reader up in wanting an answer to its familiar question: will hope triumph over heroin?