Debut author Che Yeun's Tailbone presents a tense, chilling portrait of a teenager's perilous journey into unprepared independence. In 2008, as the global financial crisis hits Seoul, the unnamed 17-year-old narrator is a high school senior unsure she'll graduate with her falling grades. She instead skips classes and roams "the loud, polluted streets of my childhood." Home is made miserable by her abusive father, who only comes home in an alcoholic stupor to berate her mother trapped in eternal subservience.
She leaves home abruptly, becoming "just another hollow teenager bobbing along the stream of Seoul." Traveling to "one of these ghost neighborhoods," she enters "an unrecognizable world" where she takes a room in a women-only lodging house. The current inhabitants of the dilapidated building are unmoored young women, often referred to as a single entity: "girls." They chase dreams of glamour and love while relying on "old desperate idiot men to feed their hunger for pretty things." Juju is the one who stands out, and she teaches the narrator about taking out questionable loans in a parent's name. Juju reluctantly cares, possibly too much, attempting to protect the teen from devolving into one of the women pulled away by "creeps and cars and nightclubs."
Yeun writes with glaring clarity, exposing a tortuous cycle of twisted hope and bleak reality, exacerbated by a sweeping financial downturn that further threatens the girls' already tenuous existence. Societal--and personal--judgment stifles these girls, already openly commodified, but Yeun hauntingly commits to amplifying their humanity, as they confess uncertainty, fight invisibility, savor fleeting moments of kindness and empathy. --Terry Hong