Adina Giorno is born in September 1977, at the very moment the Voyager 1 spacecraft is launched from Earth to explore parts unknown. From her very earliest memories, Adina is an observer, making notes on the world around her as if she's apart from it, just a temporary visitor here.

When Adina turns four, her mother fishes an old fax machine out of the trash and puts it in her room. Adina at first finds it merely confusing. But, after a dream that appears to instruct her how to use it, she writes down one of her observations and feeds it into the machine…and receives an answer. From then on, it seems not just magical but essential --- a conduit to Adina's home planet, where she's convinced she's from.

"In the end, Bertino never gives readers a conclusive answer about whether Adina's alien identity is literal or metaphorical. But that's what makes BEAUTYLAND so intriguing."

Is it a coincidence that these first interstellar communications happen the same day that Adina's father leaves the family, abandoning Adina and her mother to an economically challenging existence in an aggressively ugly corner of suburban Philadelphia? Perhaps. All Adina knows is that once she is able to communicate with the beings on her home planet --- first via the fax machine and then via her dream visits to what she calls the Night Classroom --- her feelings of distance and her talent for observation start to make sense. As she grows up and her feelings of alienation become more profound, Adina finds both comfort and frustration in her identity as an alien --- though she wonders when she'll be called back to her home planet.

Marie-Helene Bertino's beautifully odd novel, BEAUTYLAND, is a difficult one to describe. Adina's astute, frequently funny and brief missives to her "superiors" across the universe are sprinkled throughout the narrative: "Human beings…did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off." Some of Adina's communications are musings like this, although others touch on issues of class or reveal elements of her relationships with her mother and her classmates and friends.

These are interspersed with the story of Adina's coming of age, her friendships, and eventually, her move to New York City on her own and encountering a period of immense loss. Adina is constantly worried that her alien nature robs her of the ability to be fully human, to connect adequately with other people. But she is also reassured that her extraterrestrial origins explain why she never feels quite "normal."

In the end, Bertino never gives readers a conclusive answer about whether Adina's alien identity is literal or metaphorical. But that's what makes BEAUTYLAND so intriguing. For, in the end, isn't the feeling of being odd, out of place or alien one of the most human feelings of all?