O Beautiful
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this deeply moving novel, a Korean American woman confronts her tumultuous past and the fraught realities of a changing American heartland.
Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, receives an unexpected opportunity to write about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota for a prestigious magazine. Returning to the landscape of her childhood, Elinor finds the region transformed beyond recognition, overrun by tens of thousands of fortune-seeking roughnecks. As a woman of Asian descent, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation, raging against the unrelenting male gaze and locals who still view her as an outsider.
Haunted by memories of her family's estrangement after her mother's desperate attempt to escape an unhappy marriage, Elinor immerses herself in the story she's pursuing. But the deeper she delves, the more her own past intertwines with her reporting, forcing her to confront disturbing truths that will irrevocably change her and her perception of the world.
With spare and graceful prose, Jung Yun's O Beautiful presents an unflinching portrait of a community rife with tensions and competing interests, and one woman's quest for understanding and redemption in a place she once called home. This New York Times Editors' Choice novel offers a poignant exploration of identity, belonging, and the enduring scars of family trauma.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Yun's revelatory sophomore outing (after Shelter), a former model turned freelance journalist's big magazine assignment sends her back to her hometown in North Dakota. Elinor Hanson grew up near the Bakken Formation with her Air Force father, who is white, and her Korean mother, and the assignment, which she took over from a former professor, Richard, involves reporting on the oil boom in nearby Avery, N.Dak. On the flight from New York City, Elinor faces sexual harassment and discrimination for being Asian, experiences that recur throughout the novel. As Elinor interviews men who came from all over the country in pursuit of the economic opportunities provided by the oil industry, she learns that some of her former grad-school colleagues are preparing to sue Richard for sexual harassment. Elinor also begins asking around town about a woman who disappeared two years earlier, but her editor, who is romantically involved with Richard, admonishes her not to write a "dead-girl story." By the end of Yun's tightly plotted narrative, Elinor has figured out the angle of her story in a way that ties together the drama around Richard and the problems in her hometown. Yun successfully takes on a host of hot button subjects, drilling through them with her protagonist's laser-eyed focus.
