O Beautiful

September 1, 2021
A journalist returns home to North Dakota for a story and begins to come to terms with her childhood. Elinor Hanson, the child of a Korean immigrant mother and an American military father, didn't have the easiest time growing up in North Dakota, especially after her mother left. When Elinor was 18, she moved to New York, worked as a model for a long time, and then went to journalism school. A romantic relationship she had with one of her professors leads him to recommend her for a magazine story about a North Dakota town flooded by people looking for work during the oil boom. Beginning with the turbulent and unsettling flight into Avery, Elinor feels vulnerable and off-balance, a feeling which increases as she begins her interviews and realizes the town's insider-outsider tensions are complicated by race, class, and gender, all of which recall her own difficulties growing up in the area as a biracial girl. As Elinor continues reporting, she meets up with her estranged sister and begins to understand the uneasy place women find themselves in in Avery--revered for their rarity in the population, paid much more at local strip clubs than men make as oil workers, and threatened by violence and objectification. Meanwhile, some of Elinor's former classmates in New York are working on a sexual harassment lawsuit against her former professor, and they want to know if her relationship with him was consensual. The tensions in both locations force Elinor to reckon with all the different parts of her past so she can begin to understand the current moment and her own place in a deeply divided nation as an Asian American woman who has never felt a sense of belonging. Author Yun has written an absorbing and poignant novel with wonderfully complex characters and no easy answers. Intricate and enthralling.

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September 13, 2021
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.

October 1, 2021
Elinor Hanson, her name not quite matching her mixed-race visage, has 10 days to prove herself worthy of an assignment for the prestigious Standard magazine. At 42, she's struggling to establish her journalism career after long years in modeling. Her grad-school mentor Richard (and former lover, ahem) passed her the gig covering North Dakota's insane Bakken oil boom, citing his hip surgery plus Elinor being from North Dakota before her escape to New York City at 19. Returning decades later, nothing is familiar as everything is overwhelmed by multiplying roughnecks chasing big money and clashing with disgruntled locals desperate to preserve their former lives. Richard has dictated his expectations for the article, but the more Elinor talks to city and Native leaders, residents, transients, and strangers, the more she forms her own story about missing women, haunted by her disappeared Korean-born mother, who escaped Elinor's controlling white father a lifetime ago. Yun's sprawling second novel, after her brilliantly honed Shelter (2016), ambitiously confronts the multilayered mutations of the male gaze--modeling, catcalling, porn, #MeToo, sexual violence--magnified by socioeconomic disparities and, most affectingly, the cutting divides of race.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2021

Korean American journalist Elinor Hanson's first big magazine assignment takes her to North Dakota's Bakken oil fields, not far from the town where she grew up. She's thus compelled to confront a troubled childhood and her place in a troubled land, assessing race and gender issues as she surveys a boomtown gone wild with outsiders, mostly men. Meanwhile, a woman's disappearance weaves its way through the narrative. An in-house favorite (for me, too) that follows Yun's debut, the perceptive Shelter, finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

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