#o beautiful

[whatisal]

Sudoku a day keeps me sane 🙏

[lesserjoke]

Book #67 of 2022:

O Beautiful by Jung Yun

This novel is a real powerhouse, as scathing as it is insightful about white and male entitlement in small-town America. (The protagonist is sexually assaulted by her airplane seatmate in the opening chapter, and things don’t get any better from there.) She’s a fledgling reporter on her way to North Dakota to cover the region’s oil boom, where rural vistas are facing an influx of workers many times the size of their original population. The newcomers are poorer folks desperate for jobs, crammed into cots in overcrowded hotel rooms or even sleeping in their cars, and they’re more diverse than the locals, resulting in a clear racial element to the resentment against them, wrapped up in people’s feelings about immigration and a changing country. The heroine, whose parents were white and Korean, is primed by her own experiences to register this dynamic, and author Jung Yun expresses it cogently in some frankly shattering and revelatory passages.

It’s an immersive read that really situates the reader inside the character’s skin — she’s also dealing with an estranged sister and a mentor / ex-boyfriend being outed as a serial harasser — and I was imagining I would rate the book as five stars, right up until the abrupt ending that leaves the majority of its plot threads forever dangling unresolved. Some stories earn that kind of closing ambiguity, but I’m not sure this one gets there for me, despite its many other strengths.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

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[virginiadre]

"Once upon a time, this woman was loved—by a man, by a family. And maybe she loved them too until she no longer could, because that love came at the expense of things that made her who she was. When a door to another world cracked open, she seized her moment and charged through, not thinking about what her absence would do to the people she left behind. Maybe this woman regretted what she’d done later. Maybe she didn’t. But by then, it hardly mattered. What was passed was past. There was no fixing all that she’d broken, even if she wanted to. Wherever this woman landed, she had to start over, because isn’t that what you do when the story you’ve written isn’t what you hoped for or planned? You start over."

JUNG YUN, O Beautiful

[nanmykel]

Do You Remember This?

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!          

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[lessleenope]

Today I started making my prop list for a show about gun violence.  Lookout NSA watchlist, here I come!

[ollieosa]

Im just gonna...keep this pic open and g to sleep with it on my screen. yep.