Miles from Nowhere [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Nami Mun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, January 2009: There's a moment in Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun's first novel, when a flashlight dangling from the ceiling of a squatter's apartment in an abandoned building "made pretty everything it touched--an open can of ravioli, the bandage just below his knee, a green leather purse." Mun's writing does the same to the often grim details of her teenage runaway's tale, but it's not so much what she sees as the way she looks that's beautiful--a cashier at a dance hostess club has "small wrinkled ears that reminded me of walnuts," the smoking room at a nursing facility "looked more like a dried-up aquarium, embedded with ashtray stands, oxygen tanks, and old people made of cloth." Joon, only 12 when she leaves her family in the Bronx for the streets, can't make much of a connected story of her life, but that clear-eyed attention, which brings a stone-faced kindness, unfaltering and unflinching, to the most sordid of scenes, gives you some hope that she will. Like Denis Johnson's junkie masterpiece, Jesus' Son, the episodes of Miles from Nowhere are held together not by a sense of progress (though one does stir for Joon toward the end) but by a strength of vision, which fights to hold the world together when it seems nothing else will. --Tom Nissley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Mun's first novel is a 1980s urban odyssey in which Joon-Mee, a 12-year-old Korean-American, leaves her troubled Bronx family for the life of a New York City runaway. The novel follows Joon over six years, as she lives in a homeless shelter, finds work as an underage escort and a streetwalker, succumbs to drug addiction and petty crime, then tries to turn it all around. Along the way we meet a cast of addicts, grifters and homeless people, including Wink, a boisterous but vulnerable young street veteran (I didn't even know they had boy prostitutes); Knowledge, a friend who ropes Joon into helping steal her family's Christmas tree; and Benny, a drugged-up orderly and self-destructive love interest. Mun is careful not to lean on the '80s ambience, and Joon's voice, purged of self-pity, sounds clear and strong on every page. Individual scenes, including Joon's first john, her interview with an antagonistic employment counselor and her climactic encounter with a good-hearted former neighbor, are wonderfully written. Unfortunately, the novel's episodic structure prevents Joon's story from building to anything greater than its parts. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594483981
• ASIN: B0035G03W6
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #594,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Heartbreaking, Disturbing Story..., November 29, 2008

By 

delicateflower152 (Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Miles from Nowhere (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book will surely have those who wish to ban anything that isn't saccharine sweet up-in-arms. It is an disturbing story of a street child, complete with the rough language, drug use, and ugly images of activities that accompany street life. Yet, there is the beauty of friendship and the reaching for a better life by the protagonist that lift this tale to another level.

Nami Mun is a skilled author, and the reader is drawn into the story full force. I found myself cheering for Joon and hoping that she would be able to lift herself out of the street life. I wanted her to succeed; I was unhappy when she chose to do the wrong thing.

This is not a book for the squeemish or for those whose narrow-minded vision would have any controversial book banished. It is, however, a book for those seeking an articulate, intelligent author who can make you cheer for the characters in the book, even if you disagree with their life choices and their actions.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag, December 25, 2008

By 

Mint910 (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Miles from Nowhere (Hardcover)

I discussed this book to a pretty great length with several other readers and because of that lots of questions came up for me and I was able to think about this book in greater depth but it also left me with a lot of questions that I don't know the answers to!

The book started off great for me, Joon has runaway and makes a few friends in the shelter she is staying at. Great first few chapters that include working as a dance hostest and meeting a variety of other characters and doing some sort of crazy things.

Strange things start to happen, like Joon seeing what she thinks are angels and things with her family, things that didn't make total sense to me. I guess maybe I don't do so well with stories that aren't concrete because I definitely had a hard time deciding what was real and what she was seeing in her own mind. That was probably on purpose but I like to know what's going on!

I did like the way this book was written, in little fragments, similar I thought to 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, over Joon's teen years. We get to revisit characters from the beginning of the book and meet new ones. But also, because of that some of the characters are mentioned so briefly we don't really get to know them and understand their purpose in the book.

I wasn't very happy with the ending. It just ended and I wasn't really sure where things were left. So I guess I liked the premise and the beginning of the book and towards the end things didn't work for me as much.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars a bit of a struggle, April 23, 2009

By 

Thomas A. Roberts "tomrgalvtx" (Galveston Island TEXAS United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Miles from Nowhere (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book was a bit harder to read that first I imagined. It is not a one day read, in fact, it took me 6 weeks to get through a bit at a time. Eccept for the main character, there is little to find on developing of other players in this novel. There are drug pushers and users; prostitutes and pimps and then there is Joon with all this swirling in addition to a dysfunctional family consisting of recent Korean immigrants, Joon's father and mother.