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Book Reviewed by:
Erin Lyndal Martin
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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.
STELLAR NEBULA
(BIRTH)
In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother. Adina (in utero), listening to the advancing yeses of her mother's heart and her mother in the labor room, vitals plunging. Binary stars. Adina, swaying in zero gravity. Térèse, fastened to the operating table. The monitor above the bed reports on their connected hearts: beating heart, heart, beating heart, beating. Térèse's blood pressure plummets as Adina advances through the birth canal; she has almost reached Earth. At this moment, Voyager 1 spacecraft launches in Florida, containing a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extraterrestrials.
It is September 1977 and Americans are obsessed with Star Wars, a civil war movie set in space. Bounding to the stage after hearing her name, a Price Is Right contestant loses her tube top and reveals herself to a shocked Burbank audience. In the labor room of Northeast Philadelphia Regional, no one notices Tér&...
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. The book intensely impacted the way I think about my relationships with other people. 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...continued
Full Review
(558 words)
(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).
In Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, the protagonist, Adina, has a visceral reaction to a song that plays at the end of a movie she sees at the planetarium. "At the end of the film, they pan through the universe. A song begins. Made out of choppy, repetitive phrases, sturdy in the middle and fragile around the edges, so soothing she can't believe a human has made it," Bertino writes. Adina asks who the artist is and a classmate "gives her one of the most important details of her life: 'It's Philip Glass.'"
Born in 1937, Glass is an American composer known for his solo work, film scores, operas, and collaborations. He's well known for bridging classical music with popular music, thanks in part to his collaborations with a wide ...
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