The Sunday Salon: Ready for a book chat?

Am I the only one who sometimes feels, at the beginning of a book, like I just arrived at a party where everyone but me knows each other? Right now it's happening in Sunrise Over Fallujah. I'm still pretty early in, so I haven't gotten my bearings yet. I keep forgetting who the minor characters are, and each time their names come up again I have to check back. It being fiction, and a war novel at that, last night I found myself wishing one or two might get killed off soon so I could better keep track.

I'm almost done with my review of Comfort Me With Apples, I just need to think of a song to go with it. Just about finished with My Most Excellent Year--cute book but I'm ready for something more substantial, which is why I started Sunrise Over Fallujah. And today I'll be starting Miles From Nowhere for J. Kaye's Noontime Book Chat.

I've never done a Noontime Book Chat before and I'm really looking forward to it. If you have Miles From Nowhere on your pile of books to read (or even if you don't--but I know some of you do), please join us! Here's how it works: start by reading a chapter or more, then tomorrow at noon (or whenever you get there) we meet at J. Kaye's Book Blog to discuss the beginning. Tuesday, the discussion moves to Pop Culture Junkie. Wednesday will be at Presenting Lenore, and Thursday will be right here on Worducopia. Then on Friday there'll be some sort of warp in the time-space continuum, allowing us to be all those places at once.

Miles From Nowhere will be released on December 26 and can be ordered from any bookstore.
The blurb:

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.