Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Read by Andy Arndt

8 hours, 56 minutes

Published January 2024 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts: 

One of the best parts of being part of a family of readers is that they make another great source of book recommendations. In this case, Beautyland was recommended to me by Mini-me. As much as I like to think of myself as reading somewhat diversely, Mini-me puts me to shame. They read everything manga, sci-fi, fantasy, nonfiction, literary fiction. Beautyland is billed as science fiction, what with Adina being an alien communicating with her home planet. But this book can't be so narrowly defined; it reads much more like literary fiction to me. 

Adina "activates" when she is four-years-old, at the moment her head hits the concrete after she is pushed by the father she won't see again until she is an adult. That night she "wakes up" in a classroom with otherworldly teachers who tell her that her mission is to find out if Earth is a planet where others from her planet can survive when their dying planet is no longer viable. When her mother brings home a fax machine from a neighbor's trash and puts it in Adina's room, Adina discovers that if she sends a fax, she will get a reply she believes is coming from her handlers. She begins regularly sending them her impressions of our planet, the humans who inhabit it, and her own life. 

"I require speech lessons and corrective lenses and most likely teeth braces. I am an expensive extra­terrestrial."

‘‘The ego of the human male is by far the most dangerous aspect of human society.’’ 

 ‘‘Death’s biggest surprise is that it does not end the conversation.’’ 

Her observations are often spot on, often touching, and frequently amusing. Often equally amusing are the responses she receives.  

Adina is young, but wise enough never to mention the nightly lessons she will have in the coming years or that fact that she is from another planet that can't be seen. Still others can plainly see that Adina is unusual. It's that very fact that makes her a character that will stay with me for a very long time. While almost all reviewers refer to this as a work of science-fiction, I'm still unsure. Was Adina an alien being or a woman whose brain was rewired by trauma that left her with a unique life experience and take on the world around her? Beautyland works either way, and maybe the fact that I was left wondering made it all that much more impressive.