Enchanted Prose

From the depths of sexual violence to the heights of climbing the Mother of all mountaintops (Mt. Everest Himalayas bordering Nepal/Tibet, 2015; backstories Lima, Peru & San Francisco): Can you fathom what it would feel like to stand at the “top of the world”?

Even seeing images of mountaineers climbing Mt. Everest – at 29,029 feet (5.5 miles) the highest peak in the world – in “The Death Zone” where there’s not enough air to survive without an oxygen canister, the “surreal, hyperreal” experience Peruvian-American Silvia Vasquez-Lavado reached in 2015 is still beyond the grasp of most of us.

Vasquez-Lavado has certainly earned her membership in the international Explorer’s Club, part of an elite group of female adventurers who made it to the Everest summit (688) compared to 5,000+ men. Fewer have climbed the seven highest mountain peaks in the world – The Seven Summits – like she has.

The question of imagining how a survivor of four years of childhood sexual violence distinguished herself in a feat dominated by men in which she had to put her trust and life in the hands of men is astonishing. Made even more dramatic knowing she’s openly gay and that the men’s lives depended on her supreme level of physical/mental strength and endurance that had to equal or exceed theirs.

Vasquez-Lavado’s story is even more striking when she tells us in emotionally raw prose how she’d reached rock bottom before she attempted the climb. So when she says the “whiteouts” on the ledge of the Himalayas weren’t as awful as her “blackouts” from a long history of self-destructive behaviors, you gain a new appreciation for a disease that can take everything from you.

The memoir is gripping in both time periods. Vivid awesomeness in the present climbing she puts us right into, and in the alternating chapters of the horrific raping of a young girl from the time she was six to ten years old growing up in an affluent home yet a silent, menacing one in Lima, Peru. Terrorists on the street dramatizing the terror inside. Confused by a perpetrator’s cruelty that made his brutality even worse by telling her that her parents knew what he was doing to her. He is “J,” the twenty-two-year-old housekeeper her mother trusted to watch over her (and her brother).

Devastating trauma takes root deep in her soul and yet she moves on. Carrying it with her to America where she attends a college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar. From there she moves to San Francisco, where she now lives. The drama continues, because we learn she’s a Type T personality, which goes way beyond the bounds of being a Type A high-achiever. T for thrill-taker, risk-taker. We see that first play out in the thrill of her first job at a vodka company, where alcohol and wild parties flow – the origin of her reckless, out-of-control, dangerous descent into an addiction to alcohol and indiscriminate sex with women until she finds a woman she loves. Again, the prose is sharp and intense. Vasquez-Lavado doesn’t sugar-coat anything.

How remarkable that she becomes one of Fortune magazine’s “Heroes of the 500 List,” and the technology site CNET’s one of the “Twenty Most Influential Latinos in Tech” in Silicon Valley, where she did pioneering work for PayPal and eBay. 

In the Shadow of the Mountain is a stunning survival story. Most important to the author is not who she’s become but how she can use the lessons of her journey to help others heal the trauma and pain of sexual abuse.

In 2014, before the climb, she founded a non-profit: Courageous Girls. Its purpose is healing together: “Survivors of violence and abuse realize they have the power to heal.” But not alone. “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” It’s stated vision and mission is Healing Through Adventure. On the website’s home page, you’ll see pictures of seven women, the author and presumably the six courageous girls she mentored and braved the Everest climb with her – up to the Base Camp. When you read what develops between them, you’ll feel the author’s angst at having to leave them behind to meet up with her all-male team to climb higher and higher. To Camp I, II, III, IV, into the Death Zone.

The abuse stories of the courageous girls are also sickening. Some, victims of sex trafficking in India. How that criminal exploitation system takes place is explained. Unbelievable they managed to escape. On this mountaineering healing adventure, through their combined courage, they become “daughters, sisters, friends. We are Mexican, Peruvian, Indigenous, Columbia, Nepali, Indian, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Atheist. Young, old, queer, straight, nonbinary . . . Everest, the mother, is knitting us together.”

Among the author’s gifts are her literary talents to bring us right on the mountain with her and the other courageous girls, as well as into the shattering of a little girl’s innocence and selfhood. On top of being molested for years, her father thought nothing of physically whipping her with a leather belt, while her mother kept disappearing. By the time she learns where her mother went all those terrifying years, it’s not bitterness she feels towards her but a realization that her shame goes back generations and “how fragile love is.” Her love for her mother is dear. She carries that love with her too, all the way to the mountaintop.

The author found the right words to tell this soaring, searing, physical, poetic, cultural, philosophical, emotional story like we’re watching a movie of a woman’s many lives. Precisely why you will see a movie based on her life. Selena Gomez will star in Hollywood’s film adaptation of the memoir, predicted to be “her most inspiring yet.” How could it not be? A formidable acting role for any actress playing a woman “running on adrenaline, running from myself since the late ‘90s.”

The Everest climbers cannot even attempt the climb without their guides: the Sherpa people. The legendary explorer who first climbed “Chomolunga – Mother of the World” (the title of chapter one) in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary, is seen in this picture with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay:

The Sherpas emigrated from Tibet to Nepal about 500 years ago, so their bodies have physically adapted to altitudes higher than an airplane flies. They practice the “oldest form of Tibet Buddhism,” which means the climb and the memoir is part spiritual. It’s impossible not to think of the mystical when Vasquez-Lavado takes us deep and detailed into the belly of her journey. It starts when she enters the “spiritual entrance” to “a sacred hidden valley of the Sherpa people,” with its Buddhist traditions, chants, and prayer stones, flags, and wheels. There’s beauty in their beliefs as “the spirit of those blessings gets scattered across the earth.” The Sherpas respect the mountain with “humility” not “bravado.”

The memoir stands for so many things, including a mountaineer’s vocabulary and utmost mastery of technical skills in which every movement must be “rote,” because you cannot lose a second of the intense concentration demanded by an “obstacle course of ice towers,” “massive chasms,” and “giant crevasses, some over 150 deep.”

This is a must-read for anyone feeling alone, powerless, in need of healing, or seeking inspiration. Might they be all of us right now?

Lorraine

Women who defied the odds (1920s to 1970s, and the author’s personal journey): March is Women’s History Month, designated twenty years ago around the same time the National Women’s History Museum went online. I live in the DC area but didn’t know of this physical building, not to be confused with the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the only one of its kind. The reason I couldn’t recall visiting a first-of-its-kind women’s history museum is that it has yet to be realized. Firsts are symbolic of the stories in They Called Us Girls. The result of ten years of research in which Kathleen Courtenay Stone examines the lives of seven high-achieving women born before 1935, all of whom broke barriers with their own singular achievements.

Stone achieved her own success in a diverse range of legal positions, fascinated since she was a young girl about the influences on the careers of women who rose above societal expectations. The result may be a slim book (224 pages, with 34 illustrations), but it’s brimming with fascinating details – historical, societal, cultural. Strikingly relevant today, each story engaging, relatable, inspiring.

The seven women represent the “first wave” and “second wave” of the feminist movement: the Suffrage Movement culminating in women granted the right to vote in 1920; the second took fifty years later, beginning in the 1960s with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, reaching its heights in the 1970s civil rights movement with Gloria Steinem. The legendary feminist activist most associated with the era, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama and still going strong at eighty-seven years young, having just appeared in an event with the founder of Women for Women International, Zainab Salbi.

All the women Stone researched, interviewed, analyzed, and wrote compellingly about are Steinem’s age and older. The oldest she met with was ninety-six, the others in their early nineties and late eighties. Some she knew, some she didn’t. You’re not likely to have known or heard their names, remarkable given their achievements. But you’ll recognize their stories span the first half of the history of 20^th century America:

1. The First Wave Recedes: Dahlov Zorach Ipcar, Artist (b. 1917). The birth of the modern art movement, and how to become known as a female artist through illustrating (and writing) children’s picture books.
2. Walking the Color Line: Muriel Petioni, Physician (b. 1914). Ellis Island immigration, Harlem Renaissance, the vital role of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges). Dr. Petioni from Trinidad. 
3. A Unique Wartime Movement: Cordelia Dodson Hood, Intelligence Officer (b. 1913). WWII and the birth of the intelligence movement – the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which became the CIA after the war.
4. Peace and Polio: Martha Lipson Lepow, Physician (b. 1927). The game-changing medical discoveries of vaccines to fight polio, and antibiotics (penicillin).
5. The Age of Sputnik: Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, Physicist, (b. 1930). The space race, nanotechnology, and the Depression. Another Obama recipient of the National Medal of Freedom.
6. Time for Change: Frieda Garcia, Nonprofit Leader, (b. 1934). Desegregation, and the racial tensions between white and black and black versus Latino. From the Dominican Republic.
7. The Second Wave Rises: Rya Weickert Zobel, Federal Judge (b. 1931). One of the fewer than 100 Federal Judges in the U. S. District Court. Also called the Article III judges because this special position is designated in the Constitution requiring Senate confirmation. Early Harvard Law School admission of women. Her start in the legal profession sounding a bit like RBG’s.

What sets this collection of mini-biographies also apart is that after each story, Stone writes a few memoiristic pages about her own journey she calls “Intermezzo.” They’re often connected to/inspired by the woman she just wrote about. As a partner in a law firm and senior counsel in a finance organization, she’s also clerked for a Federal judge including a case she defended in Rya Zobel’s courtroom.

These stories offer much food for thought. So many firsts but not because these women sought fame and fortune, but for their passion for whatever pursuit they loved and stuck with. Yes, she persists. All raised by families that believed in education not just for their sons but for their daughters.

The question of how much progress has been made in each of the professions represented begins with the first story of women as artists. Surprisingly, women haven’t made as much progress as perhaps we thought. Stone points us to a poignant article by a highly-regarded art historian in an art magazine, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 50 Years Later,” to make that case. Ipcar went further in how she used cubism in her paintings of animals seen in more than forty of the children’s picture books she wrote and illustrated that brought her recognition. One of those books, Lobsterman, she remembered her parents reading to her brother.

The influences of parents digs deeper. The author cites a study that examined the influence of fathers on a girl’s development, part of a body of illuminating research that found if a father paid attention to his daughter he conveyed, directly and indirectly, “a sense that everything was possible.” This I can-do-anything-I-want attitude should be imprinted on all our children. In fact, it’s also a frequent ingredient in immigrants and minorities who instilled that same message. The profound “Father Effect” raises red alarms given that 15 million children are growing up in single households raised by mothers, and how many fathers have to work two jobs to help make ends meet. Many of the stories also show how hard a professional mother’s nurturing role was too, elevating the discussion of who cares for our children when it comes to the future of girls.

Not all of these women’s careers were specific to their father’s, but many were: Stone’s father was a lawyer; both Ipcar’s parents, Marguerite Thompson Zorach and William Zorach, were “noted members of the early modernist movement; Petioni’s father was a physician; so was Lepow’s.

The analysis of commonalities among these women is well-laid out by Stone in the Epilogue. Also included is a long list of resources she used in her research that’s blended in, coming across as highly accessible and entertaining.

While the lives of the women Stone chose to focus on all made a difference, there’s still a lot of progress to be made in today’s “fourth wave” of the feminist movement, spurred on by #MeToo. Inequality in the workplace is still seen in the gender gap, whether in opportunities, salaries, promotional opportunities, leadership responsibilities, and sexual discrimination. The “third wave” we’re also living now in terms of fighting for a woman’s right to her own body.

What also makes They Called Us Girls stand out is what Kathleen Stone wrote in an essay in 2019 for The Writer’s Chronicle when she was knee-deep in writing the book she describes as a “hybrid form” of the “group biography”:

“When writers add a personal layer to biography, they join the quest for meaning that began over a century ago, with artists and writers of the avant-garde.”

They Called Us Girls is a great way to celebrate the achievements of women for Women’s History Month, and throughout the year.

Lorraine

Can you escape the choices you made when you were young? (Seattle and Albuquerque, backstories Montana and LA; 1987 to 2013): Jennifer Haupt writes exquisitely, her prose agonizing and heartening. Wrapped up together, yet at odds with each other. The effect, piercing and memorable.

I was bowled over by In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, her 2018 debut (see review), an unforgettable novel of unthinkable violence and loss set in Rwanda ten years after a million people perished in the genocide in 1994. Made even more harrowing against the backdrop of a beautiful landscape in a country inhabited by spectacular, endangered mountain gorillas, and a gorgeous love story. It remains, for me, one of the most beautifully written and affecting novels in memory. Haupt spent eleven years writing it. Thus, a very hard act to follow. Second novels in general can sometimes disappoint. Come as You Are, though, is equally compelling in a drastically different way, although you’ll see some of the same themes of how to forgive, heal, and move forward in terms of grief, loss, and human failings. How extraordinarily difficult it is to move beyond past history.

Haupt lives in Seattle, so we didn’t have to wait as long for her next novel in which the lives, bond, and history between the two main characters – Skye and Zane – were forged as adolescents in the 1990s “Seattle grunge” music era. Both lonely and alienated, they vowed to be “best buds forever.” Skye was twelve when she met Zane, a rock guitarist in a band called the Bipolars wanting to make it big like his idol Kurt Cobain and his legendary band Nirvana. Music was the one place Zane felt he belonged, and where Skye spent so much time protected by him. Art, his love of music and hers drawing, mixed well. He had a girlfriend, friends with Skye’s older sister, until he kissed Skye. “Jesus, that kiss,” now he’s the one bowled-over. A kiss that changed their lives.

Come as You Are is a novel about that change as the story alternates between past and present, when Skye is twenty-eight and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the mother of a nine-year-old girl, Montana/Tanya. You’ll see why she was named that as chapters also show us what happened in Joplin, Montana and Los Angeles. It’s in New Mexico, though, where mother and daughter form new and beautiful bonds estranged from Zane.

“Cobain wrapped the restless passion of an entire generation into a three-minute anthem.” Cobain, from Seattle, committed suicide at twenty-seven. He represents “the success, the excess, the emptiness.” Some of his 90s music is here – Smells Like Teen Spirit, About a Girl, and Come as You Are – a perfect title for Haupt’s novel of finding a place where you’re accepted with people you trust. The lyrics also signify the conflicting emotions you’ll see in the novel as the past, Zane, reenters the picture.

“Music is religion,” so the novel comes with its own playlist of the songs of the other grunge bands, such as Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. One of the venues where these Seattle bands played was the OK Hotel, here too. “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?” the New York Times asked in 1992 (Haupt refers to it in the novel).

Skye and Zane had nicknames for each other: he called her Skywalker and she called him Darth. They’re not cinematic Star Wars characters but they are cinematic. Zane has made a few BIG mistakes he’s haunted by. He became addicted to an assortment of mind-bending drugs, but he’s not stereotyped. Haupt gradually lets us see him fully and empathetically, sharing a secret he’s kept to himself since first grade. His anger and shame, his rehab and therapy, how he’s grown up and yet still making mistakes. He didn’t intend to be evil like Darth Vader but he has harmed people. He wants to make up for that. Can he? And: Can he be trusted?

Skye was a lost soul in adolescence, also haunted by a loss, blaming herself and keeping it secret. Both Skye and Zane still blame themselves for this shared secret, along with two adults who also feel responsible. We feel their anguish. Does it always have to be someone’s fault? Regardless, the torment never goes away.

“Who were we back when?” is a universal question we might all be asking when we reflect on our own youthful inexperience and immaturity, when we didn’t think before we acted about the consequences of our behaviors. Can we ever forget the mistakes we made? Forgive ourselves?

Issues of abandonment are embedded in the losses. Can we reconcile with those we abandoned? And those who abandoned us? Abandoned spirits are in this novel as they were in Rwanda. There’s no way the two could EVER be comparable, but the consequences of what it takes to get past painful history is also here fictionally, interpersonally. We will never understand nor should we ever forget crimes against humanity, but Haupt has now turned her literary and empathetic eye on how profound human frailties can break hearts and people.

Haupt’s empathy is also shown in two of her other pursuits. One editing a moving collection of reflections by ninety writers on the isolation, loneliness, and grief of losing loved ones during the pandemic in Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in The Time of COVID-19. The Washington Post wondered if there “could be a timelier gift to quarantined readers.”

She also writes a column for Psychology Today called One True Thing, described as writing “about the connection between grief and love” as well as “finding family in unexpected places/ways.” Precisely what she writes about in Come as You Are.

The new family Skye and Tanya have found in an unexpected place and unexpected ways are Aaron and his mother Enola, descendants of an ancient pueblo tribe outside of Albuquerque. The Sandia Pueblo, “land in the valley below the mountains for centuries, nourishing his ancestor’s farms and cultures.” The pueblo tribe believes when “someone dies before their time” “the wind of their spirit remains on earth, abandoned in a way between worlds.”

Aaron, is studying to be a lawyer, drawn to the environmental issues in the Southwest. When the novel opens, Skye’s engaged to be married to him. We see how good he is for her and Tanya. But is she “all in?” Perceptive of Aaron to ask the question when Zane shows us up after years of estrangement. What happens if she lets him back into the picture? What does that mean for her and Aaron? More important now that she’s a mother who loves her daughter with all her heart and soul (so does Aaron and Enola) is what would that mean for Tanya? 

Aaron offers love, stability, and economic security. Skye has been on her own for a while, still struggling to earn a decent living wage so we get an intimate look at what it that feels like for single mothers and others across the country struggling from paycheck to paycheck. The Zane she loved was from the past. She really doesn’t know how she feels about him now. She owes it to Aaron, herself, and Tanya to find out. Is she strong enough to risk finding out?

Rhythm is everywhere. In the prose. In the music. In different forms of love. In Nature. In the push and pull of the journey. You don’t want to miss it. And you won’t forget it.

Lorraine

Romance with a magical twist, stepping back into the past to push ahead after a devastating loss (Los Angeles and the Amalfi Coast; present and thirty-years earlier): “I do not know who I am anymore,” laments thirty-year-old Katy Silver. “You’re grieving. “You’re in crisis,” her tenderhearted husband Eric replies, adding “people don’t get divorces in the middle of a war.” But what if the “love of your life” dies and she’s your mother? “What does that make your husband?” What it makes for us is another winning Rebecca Serle novel, One Italian Summer.

“One summer is one summer,” but “can it change your life?” What if you’re suffering an unimaginable loss and you flee to the magical Amalfi Coast in Italy, where you find yourself hiking the out-of-this-world, ancient Path to the Gods? And fortunate to be staying at the heavenly Hotel Poseidon, with a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea?

Telling you how these questions are answered would break the no-spoilers-allowed tenet, but if you’ve read one or both of Serle’s knockout 2020 and 2018 novels – In Five Years and The Dinner List – then you know she has a flair for combining grief, loss, romance, and fantasy. If the first time reading Serle’s literary magic, you too will marvel at how she cleverly mixes rock-bottom lows with fabulous highs.

Serle’s trademark, based on her three adult novels, reveals a creative, skillful, and captivating pattern of crafting prose that enchants. Prose with sexy dialogue that gets to the heart of things quickly and sharply.

Serle also knows how to win readers and audiences who like romances. Two of her four YA romance novels she adapted into the Freedom TV series: Famous and Love (2014) and the sequel Truly, Madly, Famously (2015), both hits. Another film, Rosaline, inspired by her YA debut When You Were Mine (2012), is currently being made. That leaves The Edge of Falling (2014), perhaps headed that way too? Her scriptwriting talent shines through her seductive prose.

One Italian Summer, like her two earlier adult novels, uses magical realism – time travel – dreaming up realistic storylines and settings while employing a fantastical element to drive the plot. Set in Los Angeles, where Serle lives like Katy and Eric do. (Her first two novels are set in New York, where the author also divides her time.) In this novel (and The Dinner List) the female protagonist, grief-stricken Katy, steps back into the past. (In Five Years, into the future.) All splendidly demonstrate Serle can juggle heavy-hearted, tearful together with lighter-hearted, feel-good.

The death of Katy’s mom Carol, who taught her everything and was at the center of her life, has already happened when the novel opens. The Silver family and many friends (she was a “pillar in the community”) are mourning her loss after the funeral, called sitting Shiva in the Jewish faith. By now Katy has already told loving, thoughtful Eric she’s not sure she can stay married to him anymore. It’s not just him. She doesn’t know how she can go on. “I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence,” she tells us on page three.

During this painfully sad and utterly unbalanced time, two tickets arrive in the mail for the trip Katy and her mother were planning to take up until a week before she passed away. Hope can be therapeutic. While it didn’t save Carol, could it rescue Katy, who has fallen apart?

No doubt a setting like Positano in June before crowds of tourists arrive isn’t a place for grieving. Serle knows that but given Katy’s fragile emotional state no matter how beautiful a setting she’s going to need something more to jolt her forward. So, soon after Katy arrives (note: the trip encouraged by sensitive Eric), she spots her mother. Not the Carol she knew, but the Carol Before. Before she became a Mom. This Carol is thirty-years-old, gifting Katy a precious chance to “see what she saw, what she loved before she loved me.” Why “she always wanted to return” to “this magical place that showed up so strongly in her memories.”

Still not enough when Katy’s so vulnerable and emptied out, and the author’s aim is to tempt with the thrill of a new romance. Enter into this otherworldly picture handsome, sexy, single Adam she meets on the morning after her arrival at the absolutely romantic hotel. On that sea view terrace, her appetite comes back after months when she couldn’t eat taking care of her mother on leave from her copyediting job. (Note: Eric also took leave from his film job with Disney to be by her side and the mother-in-law he loved too.) The meals are scrumptious and the delicious wine flows like water.

Under other circumstances, you’d think she’d want Eric to use the second ticket. Already you know that’s not going to happen. He understands he must let her go if she’s going to ever come back to him. Freedom isn’t just the name of Serle’s hit TV series, it’s giving someone you love the freedom to find her way. She won’t be the same. But will she find her way back home to him, or not?

If only Eric wasn’t the only boyfriend she had, she’d know how lucky she is. We really like him but she’s questioning whether they married too soon? Carol thought so, but she also knew he was such an easy-going, warm, and awfully friendly soul. “We made promises in a world lit with light. We do not know what to do in the darkness.” Two great sentences that capture how Katy feels. The thing is Eric doesn’t feel that way at all, and so he wants to help her get through this. “Because I’m your husband,” he says. “That’s what I’m here for. That’s the point.” Katy sadly isn’t able to hear the anguish and love in Eric’s voice.

Adam is wonderfully imagined as the guy to tantalize Katy in the fantasy world she’s run into. He loves Positano as much as her mother did. A perfect guide since he knows all the romantic hideaways to wine and dine including the island of Capri and Naples.

One of the great string of flirty lines between Adam and Katy goes like this:

Adam: “You know what I think your problem is?”

Katy: “What’s my problem?”

Adam: “You don’t feel like you have any agency in your life”

Katy: “You’ve known me for two hours.”

Adam: “We had breakfast, lest you forget. And you were late to dinner. Let’s call it thirteen hours.”

The crisp dialogue about her problem continues with:

Kate: “Is that all?”

Adam: “Yeah, you’re cute.”

Kate: “That’s a problem?”

Adam: “For me? Definitely.”

Carol is very much in this Technicolor picture too, surprising Katy at every turn. She may have abandoned Katy “with no instructions” as to how to live her life without her in it, but she actually provides them in her own youthful way when they magically connect.

Adam’s purpose is deeper than the steamy sexual chemistry. Along with experiencing impulsive, freer Carol, One Italian Summer asks us how we make the most important decisions in our lives. By doing what others expect us to do? Or, what our hearts tell us?

Lorraine

Land of opportunity? Or something sinister? Specific to one place? Or reflective of America? (North Dakota, 2012): O Beautiful brilliantly reads like you’re peeling an onion, one layer at a time, until you before the protagonist realize the story is “something much bigger.” “Something potentially more frightening” lurks.

Achingly beautiful, Jung Yun thoughtfully and perceptively exposes a small fictionalized Upper Midwest town, Avery, no one cared about until it became “the epicenter of the North American oil boom,” where forgotten real towns boomed. The novel’s message extends across America, reflecting a nation’s deep-seated discord.

On the surface, the story is about the powerful and the powerless. Underneath, like the oil rigs and “pumpjacks” that dig into the Bakken shale formation to extract the oil (fracking), the exposé digs deeper into other types of divides that separate the rich from the poor besides moneygrubbing. The isms are alive here – racism, sexism, classism, antisemitism, conservatism – as well as anti-ethnic with a focus on anti-Asian. The protagonist, Elinor Hanson, is Korean-American like the author.

Set in 2012 at the height of the oil boom in North Dakota, where both Yun and Elinor once lived. Elinor on a military base, her father an engineer who worked on missiles; Yun’s parents immigrated to Fargo, a choice she describes in her dedication as “a strange and wondrous place to call home.” Today, the author and Elinor live in different states: Yun in Maryland (she teaches English at the George Washington University in DC); Elinor in New York City until she returns twenty years later to her home state for a ten-day, freelance assignment for a high-circulation business magazine, the Standard, believing it’s make-or-break given her later-in-life second chance career. Except she wasn’t prepared for the “volume, the crudeness of the comments being directed at her.” “Greater than anything she’s ever experienced before.”

The beauty in the title refers to the “golden grasslands” of a former landscape now ravaged by extreme capitalism and greed. Beyond the environmental degradation, the under layers are also the victims. Resentment, anger, and rage bubble beneath the surface, so the elegant prose bursts with grit. Like the “blade edge” of someone’s voice, the prose is edgy. The people are edgy. Elinor is edgy.

The reader is forewarned about one of Elinor’s vulnerabilities in the opening line: “Men talk to her on planes.” At forty-two, she was a model for twenty years. She too is beautiful, “too pretty.” Elinor burns hot and anxious when men view her as an object having been one for half her life, and women begrudge her. On page seven, Yun offers another few meaningful words: “She’s not the stupid girl she used to be.” Well, you may beg to differ as you read what happens, but agree that a year out of graduate school she’s emotionally invested in journalism and telling the truth.

Her vulnerabilities also stem from a childhood of being viewed as “exotic.” “Compared to whom?” the narrator asks. An attitude painfully wrapped up in her parent’s loveless marriage. Her father intentionally traveled to South Korea to bring home someone akin to a “mail-order” wife, stereotyping Asian women as submissive, dutiful, knowing their place. Her mother was all those things, never fitting in with the other wives on the base. Until one day she escapes a demeaning life even when it means abandoning Elinor and her slightly older sister. Back then the two were close, needing each other. Today you’ll see how angst-ridden their relationship is and why.

Elinor struggles with identity issues – judged too Asian for North Dakota and not Asian enough in New York City. Guarded and distrustful, she has few, if any, friends. What she did have was a love affair with her former “distinguished” English professor Richard Hall, who one day out-of-the-blue (since they’d broken up a while ago) called to ask if she would take over a North Dakota story he’d been working on for months. His angle: “insiders and outsiders.”

Throughout her disorienting and unsettling stay, Elinor wonders why he gave her the assignment. His editor thought a good idea since she knew Avery Before. The problem is the Avery After sets Elinor up for emotional havoc as she senses, observes, and decides his storyline will not get to the bottom of the real story.

What does Elinor do?

Richard gives Elinor carte-blanche to use his files, thick with articles on the “history, business, geology, sociology, public health, popular culture . . . census figures, environmental studies, historical photos, news clippings, crime stats, oil industry reports.” Plus he contacts all the people he was going to interview to smooth the way for her. Each time she does, she learns he referred to her as his student, which bothers her fiercely. She wants to get out from under his dominance and be seen as a serious journalist.

It doesn’t take Elinor too long to appreciate the people on Richard’s list are the powerful, not the powerless. One interview especially stands out: when she’s heartily welcomed by excessively friendly Randy, Chairman of the Mahua tribe. The reservation isn’t far from town, sitting on oil, thus he’s celebratory. What she doesn’t understand until much later is why his twenty-something female assistant Shawnalee is so hostile and rude to her. Despite the tribe striking it rich, an underbelly story is playing out. The tribe appears to be fictionalized, but seems to be based on the tribal nation on the Fort Berthold Reservation: Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.

Understandably and empathetically, oil/money pulls Native Americans out of poverty (40% says Randy), yet I still found it surprising that the tribes didn’t treat their land as sacred as others do, like the Navajo and Hopi Nations in the Southwest for examples. This BBC video tells us what can happen when money is seen as the most sacred. Warning, it’s not good:

What Elinor perceives on the reservation she also sees all over the town. From the “ugly sprawl of development” to polluted air smelling like “Vaseline,” to water contamination, increased crime, sexual assaults (men often described as “roughnecks” in a town where men significantly outnumber women), drugs, violence, price gouging ($480 a night at the Thrifty Inn Elinor stays in!), traffic congestion, noise pollution, “housing insecurity.” Victimization everywhere she goes.

Everywhere there’s also frustrating long lines: waiting for food, registering at a dingy motel (the only vacant room she can find), and at a depressing bar where women lower their expectations for any man’s attention. 

Issues of complex land rights out West – surface rights versus mineral and water rights – aren’t new but the novel brings out the deception of unsuspecting ex-wheat farmers who sold the rights to dig under their land in the 70s when no one could imagine what would happen fifty years later. 

Other societal issues are part of the layers. “She sees more prosthetic limbs than she has ever seen in one place,” as the “oil companies supposedly love hiring vets.” They’ve done their duty in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and willing to take on dangerous jobs when the rest of America has forgotten them.

“Writing has always been her way of making sense of the world,” says the author of Elinor. Through her character, Jung Yun’s O Beautiful helps us make sense of a highly-divisive world.

Lorraine