Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Format: eBook
Read: July 2025

I really wanted to like this, but it just didn’t work for me.

I think a large part of the problem is that I have read similar books in the past (The Humans by Matt Haig comes to mind the most), and honestly, the “quirky” observations just reminded me of the Strange Planets mini web comics by Nathan Pyle, which I’ve followed on Instagram for years. For me, being a fan of this kind of thing, the premise didn’t feel unique or original, and the execution of it didn’t offer me anything new. I never felt I connected with it, and I needed it to give me more than just “being a human is weird.”

Adina is born to a single teenage mother in 1977 (as Voyager 1 launches). She grows up to discover she is an alien, sent to Earth to report back observation on the planet via fax machine. What follows is a typical coming-of-age story that spans decades of Adina’s life and various events of friendship, hurt, disappointment, love, heartbreak, and depression.

Honestly, the alien angel was a huge disappointment. It goes nowhere and just feels like a cheap gimmick. To me, this really just read like one of those books told from the POV of someone on the spectrum, or someone who feels outside of “normal” society. I enjoy those kinds of books, and I didn’t find this one as engaging as something like The Rosie Project (as dated as that is), Convenience Store Woman (or anything) by the wonderful Sayaka Murata or even Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

I suspect a large problem for me is the vignette framing. I always struggle to connect with characters when we jump around from event to event and skip huge portions of time. I prefer to be in the moment with them as they grow. I like to feel it instead of just being told something happened. Consequently none of the characters get well developed, and that includes Adina. I don’t truly have a sense of who she is as a person, and what she’d be like if I met her. Other characters like Tony and Dominic felt flat and like they were just there to be her cool, quirky queer friends. On that note, I did like that Adina is asexual; that was honestly the most interesting angle to me, but it was not developed enough. I wanted to explore more of how that emotionally impacted her and complicated her feelings towards her boyfriend.

Another thread that was briefly dangled and which I thought would be interesting was that Adina’s recollections of her childhood were different to her mother’s. For example, her mother says they didn’t eat boiled chicken all the time; they had pasta! What was that about? It never comes up again.

I did find myself losing interest about halfway, and I did do some speed reading towards the end to finish it. As soon as she moved to New York, I knew it was going to roll downhill. New York is so unoriginal to me, like we have so many fucking books about how fucking cool it is to live in New York and the various “quirks” of the city and its inhabitants. It’s done to death at this point. I think making a life in a smaller town would have been more interesting.

It’s not a bad book by any means. I didn’t hate it; it was just fine, and I’ve read better books with similar themes. I’m sure I’ll forget all about ever reading this in a couple of months!