Tailbone

A Korean teenage runaway tries to reinvent herself during the 2008 recession in Yeun’s remarkable debut. At 17, the unnamed narrator flees her family’s cramped Seoul apartment, where her frustrated and underemployed father, a former financial manager, physically assaults her kindhearted mother. She rents a room at a women’s boarding house across town and befriends Juju, a 30-year-old sex worker with a doll-like appearance, platinum blonde hair, and false eyelashes. Drawn to her housemates’ consumer lifestyles, the narrator rapidly depletes her savings but shrinks from the idea of performing sex work, in large part because Juju incurs physical abuse from clients. Juju shows the narrator a way out: securing high-interest loans with counterfeit paperwork attached to her parents’ credit history. The narrator’s transformation is complete once she buys an assortment of cosmetics and dyes her hair blonde (“I felt like a new species. And now that I felt like one, I could start living like one”). Yeun offers a no-holds-barred view into her narrator’s hardscrabble life, from her family home where “the boil of our underwear warmed our rooms,” to the ways in which men’s rage and shame over their financial failure manifest into violence against women. This is incandescent. (Apr.)