Review by Booklist Review
Elinor Hanson, her name not quite matching her mixed-race visage, has 10 days to prove herself worthy of an assignment for the prestigious Standard magazine. At 42, she's struggling to establish her journalism career after long years in modeling. Her grad-school mentor Richard (and former lover, ahem) passed her the gig covering North Dakota's insane Bakken oil boom, citing his hip surgery plus Elinor being from North Dakota before her escape to New York City at 19. Returning decades later, nothing is familiar as everything is overwhelmed by multiplying roughnecks chasing big money and clashing with disgruntled locals desperate to preserve their former lives. Richard has dictated his expectations for the article, but the more Elinor talks to city and Native leaders, residents, transients, and strangers, the more she forms her own story about missing women, haunted by her disappeared Korean-born mother, who escaped Elinor's controlling white father a lifetime ago. Yun's sprawling second novel, after her brilliantly honed Shelter (2016), ambitiously confronts the multilayered mutations of the male gaze--modeling, catcalling, porn, #MeToo, sexual violence--magnified by socioeconomic disparities and, most affectingly, the cutting divides of race.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Yun's revelatory sophomore outing (after Shelter), a former model turned freelance journalist's big magazine assignment sends her back to her hometown in North Dakota. Elinor Hanson grew up near the Bakken Formation with her Air Force father, who is white, and her Korean mother, and the assignment, which she took over from a former professor, Richard, involves reporting on the oil boom in nearby Avery, N.Dak. On the flight from New York City, Elinor faces sexual harassment and discrimination for being Asian, experiences that recur throughout the novel. As Elinor interviews men who came from all over the country in pursuit of the economic opportunities provided by the oil industry, she learns that some of her former grad-school colleagues are preparing to sue Richard for sexual harassment. Elinor also begins asking around town about a woman who disappeared two years earlier, but her editor, who is romantically involved with Richard, admonishes her not to write a "dead-girl story." By the end of Yun's tightly plotted narrative, Elinor has figured out the angle of her story in a way that ties together the drama around Richard and the problems in her hometown. Yun successfully takes on a host of hot button subjects, drilling through them with her protagonist's laser-eyed focus. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The second novel by Yun (author of the critically acclaimed Shelter) is a poignant work featuring 42-year-old Elinor Hanson, a former print catalogue model from New York who is now a journalist with a newly minted degree. Originally from North Dakota, Elinor grew up with a military career officer father and Korean-born mother who abandoned the family when Elinor was 12. Elinor now finds herself back in her home state, assigned to report on the recent oil boom. As she follows the leads of her reporting, Elinor uncovers deeper concerns, including contaminated water, unethical dealings regarding mineral rights, the abuse of women, and an unsolved murder. With a tenacity akin to Erin Brockovich's, Elinor aims to root out a story that will be fit to print. Yun's writing is filled with strong characterizations, drawing on her own upbringing in North Dakota, and she proves herself a laudable storyteller. Presenting Elinor as a woman on a journey of self-discovery and reinvention, the novel addresses key contemporary concerns, from race and gender to power and authority. VERDICT While the conclusion could have been fleshed out more, this multilayered and suspenseful tale is filled with unexpected and satisfying twists. A definite page-turner offering much to contemplate.--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A journalist returns home to North Dakota for a story and begins to come to terms with her childhood. Elinor Hanson, the child of a Korean immigrant mother and an American military father, didn't have the easiest time growing up in North Dakota, especially after her mother left. When Elinor was 18, she moved to New York, worked as a model for a long time, and then went to journalism school. A romantic relationship she had with one of her professors leads him to recommend her for a magazine story about a North Dakota town flooded by people looking for work during the oil boom. Beginning with the turbulent and unsettling flight into Avery, Elinor feels vulnerable and off-balance, a feeling which increases as she begins her interviews and realizes the town's insider-outsider tensions are complicated by race, class, and gender, all of which recall her own difficulties growing up in the area as a biracial girl. As Elinor continues reporting, she meets up with her estranged sister and begins to understand the uneasy place women find themselves in in Avery--revered for their rarity in the population, paid much more at local strip clubs than men make as oil workers, and threatened by violence and objectification. Meanwhile, some of Elinor's former classmates in New York are working on a sexual harassment lawsuit against her former professor, and they want to know if her relationship with him was consensual. The tensions in both locations force Elinor to reckon with all the different parts of her past so she can begin to understand the current moment and her own place in a deeply divided nation as an Asian American woman who has never felt a sense of belonging. Author Yun has written an absorbing and poignant novel with wonderfully complex characters and no easy answers. Intricate and enthralling. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
