Beautyland
A Novel
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4.4 • 102 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Time, Elle, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Goodreads, WBEZ Chicago, Book Riot, The Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, Women’s World
A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick
An Esquire Best Science Fiction Book of All Time
“A perfect little polished garnet of a novel.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
“A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life.” —Dakota Johnson, Bustle
From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn’t feel at home on Earth.
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 she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She 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. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?
Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The triumphant latest from Bertino (Parakeet) offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet. Adina, born in 1977 Philadelphia to an indefatigable and supportive "Earth mother," is "activated" at age four by her extraterrestrial "superiors." Her mission is to "report on the human experience" to her bosses on Planet Cricket Rice. They teach her to read and write in English before she starts school, and in one of her early communiques, she expresses a precocious insight into adult psychology after a store clerk is rude to her mother ("Human beings don't like when other humans seem happy"). In high school, she's ostracized from the popular clique, gets made fun of for having dark skin (her Earth family is Sicilian), and obsessively researches astronomer Carl Sagan ("Yes we know about him and his turtlenecks," her superiors write back, unimpressed). In college, where she desperately misses her best friend Toni, she faxes while stoned ("Plants are the earth's hair. Genius and ingenious mean the same thing!" To which her superiors reply, "These observations are unsurprising and mediocre. Are you ill?"). In the final section, Adina drops out of college and moves to New York City to be closer to Toni, who works in publishing, and whose support leads Adina to share her writing with a human audience. Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist's alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine.
Customer Reviews
Absolutely STUNNING book
I'm still thinking about the characters, long after I finished reading. Highly recommend!