O BEAUTIFUL

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.