Cover Image: O Beautiful

O Beautiful

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Member Reviews

There was a lot going on in this book. Crude oil lust. Modern nomads. Disappearing American manufacture as a dog whistle, and also as a real thing. American military imperialism personified as a man taking home a wife from Korea. #MeToo as a third act subplot. Towns that get cancer. A great joke about the proliferation of the store Staples. There’s women - Widows! Models! Sisters! There was a missing mother, a missing white woman, a dismissed factoid of a dozen missing girls in the Mahua tribe. A very late in the game skirt to possible QAnon? Fascist NIMBYism, violent racist attacks. Sexual assault, always, because it’s a “sharp” “unflinching” genre book about a woman and do we ever live to not read about our rapes over and over? This book was a sui generis hodgepodge of every newspaper headline & weekly Sunday supplement deep dive and the part of the New Yorker that isn’t theater listings. Who knows what you’ll think of this book. I’m not even sure what I think yet.

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