There is a cool tension between insiders and outsiders in O Beautiful, the spellbinding second novel by Jung Yun, whose debut, Shelter, rightfully drew massive critical acclaim. In the center of it all stands Elinor Hanson, a New York magazine reporter fresh out of a master's program. She's on assignment in Avery, N.Dak., researching a story about the oil boom in the Bakken region--a project handed to her by Richard Hall, a professor who could no longer write the story himself, a man with whom she has a complicated past.
Whereas Elinor is still a little green, Yun is again in perfect control of her story, fully exercising Richard's rule to "learn as much as possible about a subject before deciding what the story was." And there are many angles to consider: the environmental disaster of fracking; the "Avery scale" of sex politics, where men outnumber women roughly 30 to one; a missing white woman from Avery and the many more Mahua women missing from the reservation nearby; the exploding population versus the limited small-town infrastructure creating economic chaos. A windshield sunshade at the gas station runs $39.95, while a piece of cardboard can be bought from the liquor store recycling for a dollar--still a rip-off, "but at least it's the cheapest rip-off in the area." As Elinor investigates, it's her childhood upbringing in the area, as a mixed-race Korean American, that informs her enthralling attention to these subjects and more, having always straddled the line between inside and out. O Beautiful is an exceptional second work by a great American novelist. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness