Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Born when the NASA space probe, Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, Adina Giorno was welcomed into this world through the trauma and pain of birth. Her Earth mother almost died during delivery, and Adina is small and jaundiced. By the time Voyager 1 has entered the asteroid belt, both mother and baby have recovered and are at home. By 1983, Adina, now aware she is an alien sent to observe life on Earth to see if it is habitable and suitable for celestial immigrants, has been activated and begins sending messages of her examinations via a fax machine.

An interesting aspect of Adina, and the way Bertino wrote the novel, is directly bumping up against humans’ desires for answers and categories. Is Adina an alien? Is Adina just a woman who suffers from delusions, misinterpreting her otherness for this idea she concocted when she was a kid? Is she actually communicating with her superiors, a multi-soul being beyond Earth? Does it matter? If you are looking for absolutes, look elsewhere, but if you can let go of that and glide along like a trip on a lazy river, there is grace to be found here.

Bertino adopted an empyreal third-person narration, characterized by its complete observation and distant tone, yet she managed to infuse it with a sense of intimacy and warmth. It’s easy to find the beauty in the fantastic, the miracles, the extraordinary. It’s so much harder to constantly see the beauty in the mundane, the everyday, the expected. But Bertino does just that by wielding the lens of the narrator, Adina. Through Adina's continued exploration of the people around her and, importantly, of herself, Bertino reminds us that if you can find wonder in the mundane, you’ve found Beautyland.

Audiobook, as narrated by Andi Arndt: Arndt did a phenomenal job of handling the balance between the monotonous, detached observations and the warmth expressed in their underlying themes.

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The Day Tripper by James Goodhand