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.

""[A] searing debut...[Mun] writes with lovely precision, lending a hallucinatory beauty to the bleak world she has created.""
-People (four stars, ""Pick of the Week"")

""Emotionally upending...Mun relays it all with a jarring honesty that makes the book...impossible to forget.""
-Boston Globe

""Gritty, riveting...Filled with soft and lovely descriptive touches...[Mun] zip[s] back and forth between despair and joy, between degradation and exhilaration.""
-Chicago Tribune

""Remarkable...As the best novelists do, Mun has taken the essence of her personal experience and reshaped it into something original.""
-Seattle Post-Intelligencer

""Heartbreaking...We follow teenage runaway Joon as she navigates dark New York streets, and ultimately finds hope and the will to survive.""
-Glamour

""Brilliant and authentic...Those who delight in the raw power of words have a new author to add to our libraries.""
-Dallas Morning News

""Graceful, nearly transcendent...One of the most vivid and haunting novels I've read in years.""
-San Diego Union- Tribune

""Beautiful...Illuminates a side of American life one is not likely to see elsewhere.""
-The Believer