Breakaway Books

Authored by Marie-Helene Betino; Published January 2024; Science fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Beautyland is weird. I wasn’t sure whether to call it science fiction or not—if you told me that it was not, actually, a book about aliens, but about very human delusions, then I would believe you. But more than it is about aliens or delusions, it is about life.

It is a depiction of an ordinary life, filled with the ordinary challenges and griefs that come with that. The fact that the main character, Adina, believes she is faxing aliens every night is almost an oddity rather than a centrality of the book.

Who among us hasn’t felt like an alien at times? (It could just be me.) When standing in a crowd, that feeling of an uncrossable distance between what’s inside me and what’s inside them.

To me, its commentary on humanity was not all that novel. It focused on deconstruction of human social lives, and I can’t help but feel that life has been deconstructed quite a bit in recent years. But it was an earnest, genuine portrayal of the suffering and joy that each person goes through, and a unique snapshot of a specific place in a specific era.

It was hard for me to feel connected to the characters in this novel—although that seems intentional, considering the premise. That made it difficult for me to enjoy, but the creativity of the writing, of how Adina expressed herself, still made it a fun and often humorous read.