Beautyland

Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977. At the age of four she is “activated” when her father leaves the family after pushing Adina into the concrete of their yard. Adina realizes that she is a citizen of planet Cricket Rice, sent to earth to report on its inhabitants via a fax machine her mother has rescued from the trash.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is merely a childhood coping mechanism to being raised without her father on the edge of poverty, mostly isolated and alone. But her transmissions continue into adulthood — eventually being collected into a novel that receives wide acclaim. Lovely, but the conceit could quickly devolve into twee musings of life on Earth but Bertino is also writing a story of loss and grief. The acknowledgements speak of an Adina Talve-Goodman, a writer integral to the New York literary scene who passed away just prior to the pandemic at the age of 32 from cancer. The story is at turns devastating and yet Bertino managed to marry these divergent tones. I think in large part it's because Adina and her friends are queer, in every beautiful iteration of the word.