BookBrowse Reviews Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

BookBrowse:

Beautyland portrays the inner world of a sensitive girl named Adina, who comes of age with the conviction that she is an alien sent to Earth to report back on human behavior.

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Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino tells the story of a precocious girl named Adina. Living with her low-income single mother in Philadelphia, Adina faces all the trials of childhood and coming of age while feeling deeply disconnected from those around her. The story, though, feels secondary to getting to know Adina. Throughout, the narration is an unflinching close third person that never feels inconsistent or forced.

Our reading pleasure is fraught with pangs of sympathy for the extraordinarily sensitive girl. People's mouth sounds aggravate her so much that popcorn eaters in theatres ruin movies for her. "When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth," she observes. Again and again, her rarity and genius are dismissed because she just can't fit in. Asked to cover a lacrosse match for her college paper, Adina doesn't report the final score but includes commentary like, "The late season sunlight makes the grass glow like milk," much to her editor's disappointment.

Adina explains her sense of isolation by saying she is an alien sent to Earth to report on human behavior. She gets a free fax machine and uses it to send and receive faxes from her "superiors" on Planet Cricket Rice. She sends uncanny observations like, "In the future almost everything on a body will prove itself to be wisdom teeth." I was initially confused, not knowing if the superiors were real or where her faxes went. As the book progresses, that becomes less and less important. What matters is that sense of literal alienation that Adina feels, compounded by her conviction that she watches humans but is not one of them. She tells her superiors that she wants to meet others who were sent to earth to take notes, and the narration stays so close to her inner world that we don't know what people think of her or whether she has some kind of mental illness. We're forced to take her as she sees herself.

If readers can embrace that premise as a given, it's easy to empathize with Adina. Her alienation makes her all the more relatable: in her, we see our own moments of rejection and failure. I frequently wished I could comfort her, protect her, or just make her laugh. I also felt a special fondness for the characters with whom she does bond. I always wanted a big brother, and I was touched by how Adina's friend's older brother looks out for her.

Beautyland intensely impacted the way I think about my relationships with other people. Adina made me think about what others, especially strangers, might be going through, and how to reach people who define themselves by their isolation. I wondered if people create distances between each other to avoid pain and thought about how it never works. As Adina suffered a loss, I teared up and then bawled through the rest of the book. The narrator's voice stays so intimately aligned with the protagonist that her grief couldn't help but be mine, and it broke me in fractures long ago formed by my own losses and rejections. Though Adina is ostensibly not human, she takes on all of our big, hard feelings and complexities. And it's beautiful and refreshing and funny and heartbreaking, all at once.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2024, and has been updated for the January 2025 edition. Click here to go to this issue.