I started listening to Beautyland on audio back in, I think, November, via the Libby app. My time lapsed and the wait was so long that I kind of gave up on it. But when I saw that it had no wait at the library in the next town over, I put a request in and, once I had it in my hands, finished the book in about 2 days. So my reading experience was a little disjointed but I did like this odd little book nonetheless.
We begin with Adina’s birth, a traumatic event for her mother. Adina’s mother and father split up when she is young after a rather violent event. From there Adina grows up with a single mother, struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. From a very young age, Adina recognizes that she is different, a creature from another planet. When her mother finds and brings home a fax machine, it enables Adina to communicate with her superiors on her distant home planet and receive further education and instructions from them.
Like I said, an odd book. We follow Adina through childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood. She is a little different from her peers and struggles to fit in while navigating the ups and downs of middle school, her mother’s relationships with men, and her own friendships. Throughout, she sends her faxes, reporting on life on Earth and receiving replies from beings very different from those she is physically surrounded by.
In my reading of this novel, I was constantly questioning how much of this we are supposed to take at face value. Our third person narration stays close to Adina throughout so we are seeing her perspective and she believes herself to be an extraterrestrial in human form. But is this true? Is it a result of some neurodivergence or a traumatic event at a young age? Adina is certainly an unusual young girl but is she literally alien to those around her?
An overarching theme of the book though is that, whether or not Adina is literally an alien, she more than once finds people who relate to her. And as she grows older, she begins to see the ways that others also do not fit in on earth. Are they also aliens? Or is this the human condition? In some ways, Beautyland tells a very straightforward story about an alien sent to earth as a baby to observe human behaviour. But maybe it’s also a story about the fact that we all feel like outsiders to our own life, at least some of the time.
Karissa Reads Books 
Haha, this reminds me so much of the Strange Planet comics and books. For instance, instead of calling it a “car,” the aliens call it a “roll machine.” They live completely normal lives like the rest of us, but all the names for things are cute/off.
I know those! There is a similar vibe here!