Beautyland
Ratings17
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings17
Average rating4.2
A wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth, by the acclaimed author of Parakeet. At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different; she also possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. But at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone? A blazing novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life in our universe, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a remarkable evocation of feeling in exile at home and introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.
Reviews with the most likes.
I found this book in my Libby app. The title and cover caught my eye. It's a unique sci-fi story told from the point of view of an alien. The narrator was superb. Highly recommended.
Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977. At the age of four she is “activated” when her father leaves the family after pushing Adina into the concrete of their yard. Adina realizes that she is a citizen of planet Cricket Rice, sent to earth to report on its inhabitants via a fax machine her mother has rescued from the trash.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is merely a childhood coping mechanism to being raised without her father on the edge of poverty, mostly isolated and alone. But her transmissions continue into adulthood — eventually being collected into a novel that receives wide acclaim. Lovely, but the conceit could quickly devolve into twee musings of life on Earth but Bertino is also writing a story of loss and grief. The acknowledgements speak of an Adina Talve-Goodman, a writer integral to the New York literary scene who passed away just prior to the pandemic at the age of 32 from cancer. The story is at turns devastating and yet Bertino managed to marry these divergent tones. I think in large part it's because Adina and her friends are queer, in every beautiful iteration of the word.
