O Beautiful, Jung Yun
O Beautiful, Jung Yun
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

O Beautiful
A Novel

Author: Jung Yun

Narrator: Catherine Ho

Unabridged: 10 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/09/2021


Synopsis

From the critically-acclaimed author of Shelter, an unflinching portrayal of a woman trying to come to terms with the ghosts of her past and the tortured realities of a deeply divided America.

Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, is struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades away from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers.

Surrounded by roughnecks seeking their fortunes in oil and long-time residents worried about their changing community, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation and grief. She rages at the unrelenting male gaze, the locals who still see her as a foreigner, and the memories of her family’s estrangement after her mother decided to escape her unhappy marriage, leaving Elinor and her sister behind. The longer she pursues this potentially career-altering assignment, the more her past intertwines with the story she’s trying to tell, revealing disturbing new realities that will forever change her and the way she looks at the world.

With spare and graceful prose, Jung Yun's O Beautiful presents an immersive portrait of a community rife with tensions and competing interests, and one woman’s attempts to reconcile her anger with her love of a beautiful, but troubled land.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

About Jung Yun

Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Her debut novel, Shelter was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and a semi-finalist for Good Reads’ Best Fiction Book of 2016. She was a MacDowell fellow, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Tin House, among others. Currently, she resides in Baltimore, and serves as an assistant professor of English at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas on October 26, 2022

A novel with a unique plot. In O Beautiful, we follow forty-something-year-old Elinor Hanson, a biracial Asian American former model who travels to a town in North Dakota, close to where she grew up, for a journalism assignment. Elinor learns about the town and its people and their struggles all whi......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on August 29, 2021

4.5 stars. Somehow Yun has managed to capture almost everything in our present moment while also giving us a story that's extremely specific to a character and a place. Expertly done. Elinor grew up half-white, half-Asian in North Dakota, a place she never felt at home. She escaped for New York the m......more

Goodreads review by Amina on March 25, 2023

I went into this book with high hopes, but something fell. It's hard to describe, because I kept reading, immersed in the story of Elinor Hanson and fascinated by a cover with something to say. Elinor, the product of an abandoned Korean mother and American father, is struggling to make sense of her......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on November 07, 2021

I'm still not sure on my rating (it's between a 3 or 4), but I realize if I wait to write this review while I'm deciding, I will forget everything I want to say. This is an extremely challenging book for me to review. I didn't really like it and the main character is very hard to like (you start out......more

Goodreads review by Sandra on November 01, 2021

The premise of this novel excited my interest, but oh my, I am so torn after reading it. The writing is excellent. But the plot? I'm not sure what the author wanted to do with the book. There were so many themes, none of which is fully developed, in my opinion. The oil boom's impact on rural North D......more


Awards

  • San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year