Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2023-031180
Reviews
"In Beautyland , Marie-Helene Bertino's Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead. It made me fall back in love with this universe." --Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal " Beautyland is both an otherworldly and completely human look into one girl's life, written in concise, lyrical prose. It is richly allusive, funny, and hypersmart. Marie-Helene Bertino has knocked it out of the park with this one. I loved it." --Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed "This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent." --Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of There, There "Marie-Helene Bertino's delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new--a roller coaster is 'a series of problems on a steel track,' chardonnay smells like 'pee and flowers,' death is 'merely a diminishment of one perspective.' Bertino's strangering prose delights with baffle and surprise, and the chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be re-reading it forever." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!, "The triumphant latest from [Marie-Helene] Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet . . . Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist's alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In Beautyland , Marie-Helene Bertino's Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead. It made me fall back in love with this universe." --Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal " Beautyland is both an otherworldly and completely human look into one girl's life, written in concise, lyrical prose. It is richly allusive, funny, and hypersmart. Marie-Helene Bertino has knocked it out of the park with this one. I loved it." --Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed "This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent." --Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of There, There "Marie-Helene Bertino's delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new--a roller coaster is 'a series of problems on a steel track,' chardonnay smells like 'pee and flowers,' death is 'merely a diminishment of one perspective.' Bertino's strangering prose delights with baffle and surprise, and the chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be re-reading it forever." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!, "[ Beautyland ] is interested in the charged terrain of uncertainty and the tender ideas that emerge when we poke at the unknown . . . From this gorgeous data of existence, Bertino taps into a particular nostalgic awe familiar to a generation of kids raised on Carl Sagan and inflatable lunchroom planetariums . . . [Adina] continues to hope for something beyond humanity, something better, and what could be more human than that?" --Hilary Leichter, BOMB "[An] excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth . . . In Beautyland , that which is wonky and uncanny reveals itself in the familiar details of everyday life . . . This is where the sorcery lives . . . When Bertino writes of magic, of science fiction, of the surreal, she is writing of reality." --Madison Ford, Brooklyn Rail "A singular novel with a singular protagonist who has a singular view of the world . . . Wonderfully quirky, funny, bittersweet. . . A very funny and empathetic book that unravels the contradictions, complexities, and weirdness of this thing we call life." --Ian Mond, Locus Magazine "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." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The triumphant latest from Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet . . . Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist''s alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Expertly imagination-bending . . . With so much humor and heart, Bertino balances fantasy and hyperrealism, metaphor and fact . . . It''s like fiction was invented for Adina and her tale, which unspools so assuredly readers might mistake it for their own." --Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review) "This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent." --Tommy Orange, author of There, There "In Beautyland , Marie-Helene Bertino''s Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead. It made me fall back in love with this universe." --Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal " Beautyland is both an otherworldly and completely human look into one girl''s life, written in concise, lyrical prose. It is richly allusive, funny, and hypersmart. Marie-Helene Bertino has knocked it out of the park with this one. I loved it." --Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed "Marie-Helene Bertino''s delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new. The chapters are so propulsive one doesn''t even fully notice the way she''s subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It''s impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I''ll be rereading it forever." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
CLASSIFICATION_METADATA
{"IsNonfiction":["No"],"IsOther":["Yes"],"IsAdult":["No"],"MuzeFormatDesc":["Hardcover"],"IsChildren":["No"],"Genre":["FICTION"],"Topic":["Literary","Science Fiction / Alien Contact","Contemporary Women"],"IsTextBook":["No"],"IsFiction":["No"]}
Synopsis
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A Must-Read: Nylon , The Boston Globe , San Francisco Chronicle , Chicago Review of Books , Literary Hub , The Millions , Kirkus Reviews , BookRiot , The Christian Science Monitor , Our Culture , The Saturday Evening Post "A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life." --Dakota Johnson, Bustle From the acclaimed author of Parakeet , Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth. 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., A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review , Time , Elle , Esquire , Goodreads, and WBEZ Chicago A Must-Read: Nylon , The Boston Globe , San Francisco Chronicle , Chicago Review of Books , Literary Hub , The Millions , Kirkus Reviews , BookRiot , The Christian Science Monitor , Our Culture , The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia magazine "A monumental accomplishment, a shimmering masterpiece." --Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe "A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life." --Dakota Johnson, Bustle From the acclaimed author of Parakeet , Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth. 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., A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review , Time , Elle , and WBEZ Chicago A Must-Read: Nylon , The Boston Globe , San Francisco Chronicle , Chicago Review of Books , Literary Hub , The Millions , Kirkus Reviews , BookRiot , The Christian Science Monitor , Our Culture , The Saturday Evening Post "A monumental accomplishment, a shimmering masterpiece." --Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe "A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life." --Dakota Johnson, Bustle From the acclaimed author of Parakeet , Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth. 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.
LC Classification Number
PS3602.E7683B43 2024
ebay_catalog_id
4
