Miles from Nowhere

Given a reading choice, I usually choose the unusual or unfamiliar over the ordinary or familiar. I'd rather read a crime novel set in Mongolia (The Shadow Walker, by Michael Walters, reviewed here: http://www.military.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/military-bookshelf-paperback-corner) than another Harlan Coben or Robert B. Parker.

I have nothing against Coben and Parker. Both are good writers and produce invariably interesting and entertaining novels. But, after a while, they don't have the same ability to surprise.

I remember "discovering" Denise Mina a couple years ago—long after more discriminating readers had found her. I tried my first Mina novel only because it was set in Glasgow. Not as exotic as Mongolia, but more so than L.A., New York or even Paradise, Massachusetts.

I began with The Dead Hour (reviewed here: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,106739,00.html) and discovered not only the gritty underside of 1980s Glasgow but also a uniquely compelling heroine in young reporter Paddy Meehan. Field of Blood quickly followed. Slip of the Knife waits in my "guilty pleasure" queue.

That explains why I've been reading Nami Mun's Miles from Nowhere (Riverhead Books, $21.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59448-854-2). It's geographical setting—New York City—is hardly exotic to Americans. Much of our popular culture—literature, movies, and television programs—is set there. It's the sub-setting—the city's underbelly of drug dens, sex parlors, and homeless shelters and the runaways that populate them—that most Americans will find unfamiliar and unsettling.

Author Mun, a Korean-American, was herself a teen runaway who turned her life around—earning a GED and a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. Regarding her decision to write about the runaway culture that she escaped, she says that it sprang from necessity. "I needed to tell the story of a teenage runaway," she explains while noting that there are some two million runaways in the U.S.

Mun's protagonist is Joon-Mee, a thirteen-year-old Korean-American from the Bronx, who leaves home to escape her severely dysfunctional immigrant family. Over the next five years, Joon is raped, beaten, lives in abandoned buildings, works as a hooker, becomes a heroin addict, and is arrested. Quite a resume for an eighteen-year-old.

Mun does not try to sugarcoat Joon's degradation. "In order to get what I needed," Joon quickly and regrettably learns, "parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed." Predictably, the first things to go are her virginity and her innocence. For the uninitiated, it's a harrowing descent into a hellish place just out of view of mainstream society.

To her credit, Mun does not offer any easy answers for the problems of runaways, throwaways, and the other homeless. The moral of Joon's story for me is that there are no legislative solutions for the kind of alienation that drives Joon and other teens to run away. The best deterrent remains a stable, loving family and a nurturing environment.