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Lejos De Ninguna Parte (2011)

by Nami Mun(Favorite Author)

3.46 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Libros del Silencio

review 1: This was a difficult book to read due to the subject matter. A girl from a troubled family runs away at a very young age. In the book, she is narrating many scenes from her teen years. Most of them are difficult times and not what I would want my child to go through. She learns many lessons, but mostly the hard way. At times she is hopeful and at other times despairing. It is a harsh world that she is navigating and she finds comfort from an odd assortment of people who both help and harm her along the way. I am glad I read it because it reminds me that my view of life is limited.
review 2: This is not an uplifting book. I read it quickly but I found that in the spaces between, when the book was facedown on the nightstand and I was living my day, it left a heav... moreiness in my heart. Nami Mun’s fictional Joon is based loosely on the author’s experiences. They are both daughters of Korean immigrants. They are both former teen runaways who landed in the rough streets of New York City. They both took on a series of odd jobs, including selling Avon products and working as an assistant activities director at a nursing home. We are not privy to what parts are true and what parts of this book are Mun’s carefully researched fiction.According to interviews published online, Nam didn’t want to write a memoir; she felt more comfortable telling stories in the fictional realm. This book is set up as a collection of essays about Joon, who experiences just about every bad thing that can happen to a young girl alone on the streets of New York City. In spite of the dark themes of physical abuse, mental illness, prostitution, the particular emotional turmoil that people face when they cannot assimilate into another culture, drug addiction, and all the various sub-cultures of street life, Mun’s writing shines like “a lace of sparkling diamonds – a beautiful jagged doily for the crushed picnic basket, the soggy bib, the map stuck to the pavement with sticky blood.” Here I quote Mun’s description of the aftermath of a bus accident. So much of this book is like this: things both good and bad depicted as objects to be observed neutrally for their basic qualities.Each essay unfolds like a photographic story of the loss of a girl’s innocence, the troubled characters who step in and out of her experience and the landscape in which it all unfolds. You cannot help but root for Joon, who abandons her parents as much as they did her. Throughout the book we watch as Joon emerges from her naïve fog. While much of what she learns in survival mode is not beneficial to her future, she does by virtue of physical distance, begin to understand what happened to her parents. It is through this most painful journey that we see the smallest hope that she will rise above. less

Download links for: Lejos de ninguna parte

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