Beautyland

Bertino's third novel follows Adina, a girl born in 1977 — the year Voyager 1 launched — who believes she was sent to Earth by extraterrestrials to study humanity and files her findings home via a fax machine. Critics were broadly and warmly enthusiastic: the book drew starred trade reviews, was named to prominent year-end best-of lists, and was described by major daily reviewers in landmark terms, with one calling it "astonishing" and another a "shimmering masterpiece." The consensus strength is the book's voice — deadpan, wry, and precise — and the way it treats Adina's alienhood as simultaneously real and a metaphor for the felt otherness of growing up working-class, awkward, and watchful in Northeast Philadelphia. Reviewers repeatedly singled out the faxes themselves as the book's engine: short, funny, devastating observations of ordinary human behavior that find real tenderness inside banality.

The style is deliberately episodic and observational rather than plot-driven; Adina catalogs decades of small cruelties and kindnesses from the margins. Some readers — less so professional critics — found the emotional temperature hard: the detached tone and the accumulation of loneliness can feel bleak, and a recurring complaint is that the book runs long in its middle stretches and ends with a swiftness that leaves some readers unmoored. There is also a split over whether Adina reads as a fully realized character or a lens: most reviewers find her specificity mesmerizing, but a minority of general readers found her remote and her missives, in places, repetitive. The disagreement is essentially about tone tolerance, not craft — even detractors tend to concede the sentences.

At its core the book is about loneliness, friendship (Adina's bond with her best friend is the emotional spine critics praise most), the ache of never quite belonging anywhere, and the question of whether the beauty in an ordinary human life is enough of a reason to stay. It refuses easy sentimentality, and that refusal is both what critics admire most and what makes it a heavier read than its whimsical premise suggests.