O Beautiful

A Novel

By: Jung Yun

Narrated by: Catherine Ho

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

Search for an answer

This book was very well written and most meaningful to me because we all search for answers to things that have happened in life. Life is hard to understand. Sometimes our questions about our family are answered in strange ways.

Average

Not sure what the author was trying to convey. A lot of angry characters in this story. A story that does not take the reader anywhere. or resolve anything. Kind of disappointed. Gave it a try because it was on a list of best reads for 2021.

O Beautiful Just Beautiful

Should become an American classic! I found myself feeling graced with the grit of Eleanor's character.

Nothing stands out

The book had many possibilities to capture our interest, but in the end, failed to take most of the storylines to a conclusion. Found the narrative pulled us in too many directions as to make none of the points stand out as important.

not my favorite

I didn't find the main character likeable--she was angry, judgy and lacked any personality. You didn't really get to know anyone else. It also felt like the author was trying so hard to pack as many racism, feminism, and 'me too' moments they could into the story that none of them had much of an impact on me as a reader. I did enjoy the narrator and it was an easy listen.