Miles from Nowhere

With stunning prose and a sensitive eye for detail, Mun unfolds five years from age 14 in the gritty and difficult life of a young Korean American runaway on the urban streets. Not only does Joon quickly lose her innocence and succumb to the seemingly soothing beguile of drugs, leading to heroin addiction, she must fight for a lost selfhood as she attempts to reconcile being the daughter of an abusive and abandoning father, and a neglectful and strangely behaving mother who only had eyes for the father. Though what Joon lives through and what she remembers is horrific and exactly as awful as one imagines such a hardscrabble life can be, Mun's unsentimental take on it and her stunning prose that reaches deep into the core questions of show more what makes us continue when so much is lost, when even the self is seemingly without redemption, is what makes this book a breathtaking reward. show less

Miles from Nowhere is one of the most startling and brutally honest books I’ve read in a long time. Author Nami Mun skillfully takes her readers deep into the heart of New York City’s world of young runaways. Using and episodic approach through the eyes of a young Korean teenager named Joon, she brings us face to face with some of Joon’s darkest days.

In so many ways this book was very heartbreaking as Joon moves through the episodes unloved, unwanted, and alone. At times she is surrounded with junkies, thieves, prostitutes, and sexual predators. Through most of the book Joon is using drugs and living day to day in shelters, motels, abandoned buildings, and on the street.

As horrific as all of this sounds, Nami Mun has almost show more poetically written these stories in such a beautiful way that I found it very easy to relate to her character Joon. She tells just enough for you to feel the pain and the episodes bounce off of each other so well it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.

I don’t want to let on too much about the book because the book because there is beauty and hope to be found in this book, but only Nami Mun can tell this story well.

My only two criticisms are that I would have liked to have seen each chapter dated to give the reader a better idea of how much time has elapsed between each chapter and how much Joon might have matured. There are hints, but I would have still preferred a stated date at the beginning of the chapter. I also wish the book was longer. This book is a short, easy read, and the pages flew by quickly in anticipation of a better life for Joon. show less

Mun’s novel defies a traditional storyline again and again, with its episodic breaks that lead the reader to realize that there is little coherence to the life of Joon, the daughter of middle-middle class immigrants who choses to break from the literally sick life she lives at home, abandoning painful coherence for the often-unpleasant upheaval of the streets of New York. In each episode, we find Mun trying on a new self, seeing how much of her still-nascent self (Joon is only 13 at the outset of the book) she is willing to sacrifice in any given situation: her autonomy? Her body? Her family? Her sobriety? Her children? These are the challenges we meet in the episodes; there are no Dickensian light-hearted romps through poverty here. show more This is the glittery, slick world of the early 1980s, and this is its beyond-seamy underbelly. show less

Miles From Nowhere is an unblinking, stark and disturbing story of Joon-Mee, a Korean girl who emigrated with her family to the Bronx and ran away at age 12 after her father left her and her mother to fend for themselves. The novel takes place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when NYC was an especially dangerous and unforgiving place to live. Joon encounters a variety of fellow misfits, who provide her with shelter, support, drugs, and loveless sex, and works as a prostitute, drug dealer, petty thief, and escort girl. Somehow she maintains enough optimism and manages to keep her head barely above water despite her precarious existence, believing that she can "choose my own beginning, one that was scrubbed clean of everything show more past."

Much of the story is told in a matter of fact fashion, as she describes her life and those around her without much introspection or insight into the pain she must have experienced, which made the novel less depressing and more readable than it could have been. The ending, though, was quite surprising, and the story ends rather abruptly, which was less than satisfying. However, it was a fast paced and captivating read, and is definitely recommended. show less

Each and every scene in the book was beautifully written, but they didn't come together into an overall story for me.Miles from Nowhere follows Joon from the time she decides to leave home at 13. Each section is a painting of a different scene from her life, and it is a life in a downward spiral. There are details on where she's living, the friends she has, the drugs she's consuming,what she has to do to survive. Each section is beautifully executed, a portrait of the dark world Joon is in at that moment, with flashes back to the life that led her here.I particularly loved the section where Joon thinks she sees God on a bus, but she loses him when the bus crashes. She then encounters several children that she suspects are angels. If show more some theme like this had carried through the book, it would have improved it tremendously for me. As I think about it now, there were other threads that kept appearing, particularly regarding her absent parents, as she revisited the many ways they had always been missing from her life. It's interesting for me to note that I had tremendous sympathy for the mentally ill mother in [b:Up from the Blue: A Novel|7907787|Up from the Blue A Novel|Susan Henderson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1273840506s/7907787.jpg|11176053], but none at all for the mother here-- perhaps because the mother there knew the father would care for the children, and there was no such safety net here.All in all, I didn't feel there was an overall structure to the story that I could see, and no bright points to balance the shadows. To really love the book, I needed a map or some light to guide me. show less

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 show more 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. show less

There have been many runaway, homeless, downtrodden teen novels. What makes Miles from Nowhere different is that it tells the story of a 13-year-old Korean-American, not the typical runway candidate. Joon’s immigrant family never made the transition to the American dream and one day she leaves her needy mother for the streets of New York City.

Also different is the episodic telling told with Joon’s pragmatic voice. Though she meets all the horrors of typical teen runaway tales, she never makes excuses nor glorifies the situations. The supporting cast is a hodgepodge of street characters both vibrant and wretched.

While this seems like an excellent set-up, there was something amiss in the telling. The episodic structure of the novel, show more while well-written individual chapters, keeps one from ever really relating to Joon or her vibrant comrades. The various street characters that Joon encounters are colorful enough, but lack a linear depth. One can’t help but wish that we had gotten to know them better. The setting, 1980’s, seems almost an afterthought, not strong enough to warrant notice.

In the end, Miles from Nowhere left me miles from caring. What could have been a final poignant scene was just an ok-it’s-over-now moment. There's a load of praise for this title across the web, the writer is certainly a talent, but Miles from Nowhere just didn't connect with this reader.

Final Thoughts: excellent writing, great premise, poor plot execution due to structuring of tale, lacking depth of character and/or setting.

Review first published on Reading Rumpus show less