June book club pick! Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
give me weird stuff please and thank you
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Our June pick is Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
How I chose it:
When I become disparaged about the state of my writing, I enjoy watching other authors discuss their own work. I came across this interview with the author of Beautyland and found her insights on voice really inspiring. I had already been interested in the book when it was first announced, but I had no idea the story had some form of aliens in it!!! Why didn’t you tell me sooner!!?? I’m always in the mood to ruminate on the meaning of life while encountering strange and funny things.
Details:
Literary fiction, 336 pages, 2024
Synopsis from BOMB magazine:
Adina is a smart kid from Philadelphia, born in 1977, living with her single mother. But she is also from a galaxy far, far away, a planet whose name cannot be spoken with human words but rather approximates the sound of a cricket landing on rice. After a terrible fall at age four, Adina is “activated”—a rebirth into an awareness of her true identity. The circumstances of her presence on earth are explained in a recurring series of dreams she calls the “Night Classroom.” She comes from a world where souls exist only in the plural, ideas are intuited, and the future is uncertain. Her job as a visiting extraterrestrial is to document what it means to be human, and the long arc of her work might have life-and-death consequences. She is not meant to stay here; she will be retrieved.
Is Adina really an alien? Or is she just lonely, confused, profoundly hurt? The joy of Beautyland lies partly in the way it rejects the simplicity of this false binary.
Grab your copies of Beautyland in any form you wish, and let’s read baby!
I’ll see you in my chat (in the Substack app!) to discuss this book while we read during June!! Yay! Who’s in? Let me know in the comments.
Looking forward to this one!!
this looks like a fun read!