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If you remember the first time you left your family to go to summer camp, you probably remember how that time marked you. You leave as a child, but after spending a week or two away from home and all that’s familiar, you return changed. 

,” follows a young boy, almost 11, as he begins the shift toward adolescence. A few tumultuous events make Jeon-Gi very aware of his new and growing personhood — and then he leaves for summer camp, where he experiments with different wants to be seen and to act in his suddenly widening world. 

Told through the now-adult Jeon-Gi’s memories, the story asks questions who how we become who we are. 

“We’re not just formed by the world,” Lee tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “There’s part of us that’s ready to be forming on its own. So the world doesn’t only form us, it reveals us. There’s an interplay between those things, that sometimes can go in a direction we didn’t expect.”

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There’s something about the first time you leave your parents for summer camp that changes everything. Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, “A Tender Age,” captures one boy’s passage from childhood to adolescence and asks questions about how we become who we are. 

A new coming-of-age novel by Chang-rae Lee examines how we become who we are

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