Status Updates From O Beautiful

Elinor is brittle and obsessed with the costs of her great beauty (admittedly, there are costs). She is rude and unapproachable. Bad things for a reporter. Add to that, she is unprepared: she goes to interview a tribal chairman and starts asking a woman about a dead White woman, seemingly unaware of the hundreds of murdered and missing indigenous women in ND. She is terrible at her job. None of this feels honest.

I like the approach Yun is taking to power imbalance, but I think she should have limited the modeling storyline. I am glad Elinor was able to cash in on a type of beauty that had brought her nothing but ostracism in her home state of North Dakota, but that focus is't working for me, and I think it blurs Yun's objectives. I also wish Elinor were less unpleasant, but I understand her dissonance and its impacts.

I love reading things set in places I have lived, and it is hard to find North Dakota set literature, so that par tis great. So far, Yun captures the weird Bakken years and their impact on ND well. I am less convinced by the way she addresses women's vulnerability and commodification, but there are some good places she can go with this, and I am rooting for that.

Excellently written,
As a Virginia resident, I can relate wholeheartedly to the oil boom in North Dakota. what were small, but stretched out, farming communities in VA, are now being bought out from under the next generations (who no longer value local agriculture, and just see dollar signs) turning into Solar Farms, not even owned locally or even in the US. The permanent damage done by them has scarred these lands

It’s not great, the last ten pages have been pretty good however the first 30-35 pages made me want to quit reading.