Beautyland

August 1, 2023

As Voyager I is launched, a little girl named Adina Giorno is born in Philadelphia, the emissary of extraterrestrials seeking to understand humankind. The invention of the fax machine allows her to share directly with her home planets all the terrors and wonders of Earth. The O. Henry/Pushcart-winning Bertino (Parakeet) always reaches for the unusual. With a 25,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from October 2, 2023
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. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
A coming-of-age story in which the main character is, literally, out of this world. In Northeast Philadelphia, in the Earth year 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a woman destined to be a single mother. The baby is too small, and her mother, observing her under the hospital phototherapy lamp, thinks she looks "other than human. Plant or marine life, maybe. An orchid or otter. A shrimp." One reason for this might be the lamp's unearthly blue-green light, or the fact that the baby is early and the mother traumatized by her difficult birth. Another might be the fact that Adina is actually otherworldly, an alien life form from a planet 300,000 light-years away, sent to infiltrate human society and "take notes." This Adina does assiduously all throughout her childhood and adolescence in 1980s and '90s Philadelphia, where she lives with her Earth mother in a poor, ethnically Italian neighborhood that is slowly sinking into the toxic ground on which it was built. The notes themselves--winsome observations on the nature of the creatures that surround her (animal, vegetable, and, most mysteriously, human)--are sent via a fax machine Adina's Earth mother scavenges from the trash and sets up in her bedroom. Adina's extraterrestrial superiors return encouragement via interstellar fax and offer occasional instruction through telepathic dreams that take place in their best approximation of what an Earth classroom might look like. As Adina grows and her circle of influence widens to include her tough but loving mother, her iconoclastic friend Toni and Toni's film-buff brother Dominic, enemies, loves, false friends, and the other characters of a well-rounded Earth existence, Adina becomes more and more aware of how different she feels from her Earthling friends, even as her life follows the pattern of their joys and sorrows. A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino's masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales--so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.

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Starred review from December 1, 2023
When Adina Giorno is a girl, her mother rescues a perfectly good fax machine from the trash, and Adina learns to use it to communicate with her superiors, the non-earthlings she believes ""clipped a part of their toenail and sent it wrapped in a skin suit presenting as a girl,"" namely Adina. For example, their response to Adina's missive about Carl Sagan, with whom she's obsessed, ""YES WE KNOW ABOUT HIM AND HIS TURTLENECKS."" Adina sends countless messages as she learns about human life by riding the bus from her Philadelphia neighborhood to a tony suburban school on scholarship, waitressing at a diner, dropping out of college, moving to New York, filling the candy dish at her ordinary desk job, and, eventually, publishing a book about being an alien. Adina tries romantic love and determines it's not for her, but friendship, one in particular, digs in deep. As she did in the expertly imagination-bending Parakeet (2020), and with so much humor and heart, Bertino balances fantasy and hyperrealism, metaphor and fact. For whom is the act of belonging not, to some degree, an exhausting, lifelong quest? It's like fiction was invented for Adina and her tale, which unspools so assuredly readers might mistake it for their own.

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