O Beautiful

Thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It pains me to say this since I thought Shelter was a phenomenal read, but this book tries to do too much. It attempts to cover: fracking, the impact of oil money disrupting traditional communities, rural/urban dynamics, absentee parent/family issues, sexism and misogyny (including academic sexual harassment, rape, and assault), racism (being biracial, the experience of Native Americans, and more), and the rise of white supremacy. Ultimately we end up with a very uneven book where instead of interlacing these areas with the complexity they deserve, we end up with pockets of topics that start and stop with little cohesiveness.

I also found Elinor an unsympathetic main character who reminded me a lot of the MC in The Flight Attendant.

Jung Yun's prior book Shelter absolutely wrecked me, so I picked up her new release O Beautiful without much thought. This was beautiful and heart wrenching but yet, the pacing was a bit off for me. Some parts felt more dry in the writing style and plot. Overall it didn't pact the ‘oomph' in the end for my reading tastes.

If you didn't get along with this one, I still highly recommend Shelter. If you've read Shelter and the premise of this book intrigues you, pick this one up as well as much of Jung Yun's writing talents show strong in this novel too.

There's so much going on in this book. Really important issues of today and yesterday: power, money, race, gender, class, capitalism, the financial crisis of 2008, sisterhood and motherhood, MeToo. I really appreciated this book for all of that, plus the tight writing and powerful scenes drawn. I was desperate to finish it, although the topics themselves were not enjoyable. I recommend. This would be a good one for discussion. I won't soon forget this book. 4 or 4.5. I did feel that a few of the twists were a bit unbelievable or contrived. But she made it work.

“O Beautiful” by Jung Yun was a required book for my English major so I tried going into it without bias since I would not have typically gravitated toward it.

The writing was extremely well done and I enjoyed the plot and pacing of the story overall.

The main issue I have is the ending. The entire point of Elinor going to North Dakota was brushed over at the end and stopped so abruptly. I wish it elaborated a bit further on the piece she was writing and how it was completed. The ambiguous ending took away from my enjoyment and left me wanting more. Plus I did not enjoy how Elinor focuses so heavily on peoples physical appearances and overall body types when introducing characters. I don't think pointing out someones weight is influential to the plot at all.

I probably wouldn't recommend this book because it fell short for me. If there was a bit more of an elaborated ending it could have been higher rated.

I would be interested in checking out other work by this author though because I really enjoyed the writing and use of descriptive detail (aside from focusing on describing characters based on their body types).