There are books you read, and there are books that read you. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland falls firmly in the latter category—a shimmering, genre-bending novel that manages to feel both comfortingly familiar and utterly alien in the best sense of the word.
On the surface, Beautyland is a portrait of Adina Giorno, born in 1977 Philadelphia at the moment Voyager 1 launches into space, carrying the famous Golden Record—a time capsule intended to tell extraterrestrial life about Earth. Adina, it turns out, might be an alien herself, sent to observe Earthlings and report back via fax machine to her faraway planet. This premise alone is delightfully surreal, but Bertino isn’t writing science fiction as escape. She’s using it as a lens to magnify something deeper and more tender: what it means to live life feeling not entirely of this world.
Continue reading “Beautyland review: what it means to be from another planet (or maybe just human)”
Write on the World 