52 pages • 1 hour read
Marie-Helene BertinoBeautyland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Stellar Nebula (Birth)”
Part 1, Pages 3-12 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide and anti-gay and anti-asexual bias.
In northeast Philadelphia, in September 1977, in the middle of a craze over the movie Star Wars, Térèse has difficulty birthing her daughter, Adina. At the same time, the spacecraft Voyager I launches from Florida holding a record of earthly sounds. Astronomer Carl Sagan is responsible for selecting the Voyager’s contents and “launching this bottle into the cosmic ocean” (4). Tiny Adina looks alien to her mother. Adina’s home planet, a planet near the star Vega, is 300,000 light years away, and she is a probe sent to collect information.
Adina and her mother and father live in an apartment complex across from Auto World, which has an inflatable flying man stationed outside. Adina’s mother pulls a fax machine from the neighbor’s trash and puts it in Adina’s room, testing it by trying to fax their own phone number. Adina is four. Her father is frustrated trying to build a swing, and when Adina asks him if it’s ready, he pushes her away. Adina falls down concrete steps and is activated.
That night, Adina wakes in what appears to be a classroom. She perceives her superiors, a multi-souled, multi-personed being, shimmering at the front of the room. She sees images of feeding paper into the fax machine. When she wakes, she sends a fax regarding the bunnies she saw. A response comes asking her to describe bunnies.
Part 1, Pages 13-25 Summary
Adina’s mother says that her father has left. They visit Beautyland, a supply store. Adina’s mother is proud because Adina has been put in an accelerated learners’ program. For Adina, her mother is the center of her world: “Adina is a student and her mother is her major concentration” (15). Her mother works in a care facility and has a second job typing in timecards for a nearby factory. At Beautyland, they spray different scents into the air and are scolded by the clerk. Her mother observes, “Sometimes people don’t like when other people seem happy” (17). Adina shares this and more of her observations with her superiors, who respond with an answering fax. Adina imagines that the Flying Man outside Auto World is cheering for her.
The name of the planet Adina is from sounds like crickets hopping onto a plate of rice, so Adina thinks of it as Planet Cricket Rice. Each night she wakes in the night classroom. She understands that her job is to take notes on human life.
In fourth grade, a girl named Antoinette-Maria, nicknamed Toni, joins their class. When they talk, Adina shares that she is from past Neptune, and Toni says that she’s from Neptune, too. Adina learns everything she can about Carl Sagan. She feels validated that Sagan’s Voyager is looking for Adina. Adina’s favorite place to visit is Martin’s Aquarium, where things are quiet and calm. She likes watching the betta fish and thinks that the water is saying, “Ooo moo a moo a” (23). Her mother has Adina buy her cigarettes, which makes Adina nervous. In the night classroom, she learns about human evolution and concludes that the pictures of extraterrestrials she sees in her mother’s National Enquirer are more evolved humans. Her mother notes that Adina seems tired in the mornings.
Part 1, Pages 26-39 Summary
Adina and her mother do without many things as they have little money. Adina’s mother takes her to the movie theater to meet Mark, her friend from work. They watch E.T., “the story of a gentle alien being helped by young humans” (28). Adina, who is sensitive to mouth noises, is deeply affected by the film. When she and her mother visit the facility where her mother works, which cares for intellectually disabled people, Adina is surprised to see how warm and friendly her mother is with the clients. When they shop at the flea market, Adina gets books from Mrs. Goldman. One day Mrs. Goldman gives her Carl Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe.
Toni, Adina’s closest friend, teases her for having a crush on Amadeo Calvi. Adina is prescribed correctional lenses and a speech therapist. In the night classroom, she learns that her people have evolved past the body and are many connected souls. Their planet is in danger, and it is Adina’s job to learn if they can survive on Earth. Adina is left on her own at night to do homework while her mother talks to Mark on the phone in her room.
Part 1, Pages 40-57 Summary
Adina acquires glasses. Dominic, one of Toni’s brothers, explains making out. Adina is riveted when they take a class trip to the planetarium, and she looks for her home planet. She is captivated by the music of Philip Glass. Adina’s mother gets a French tip manicure and is annoyed when Adina asks for help with homework. She takes Adina to the Seafood Shanty to celebrate Mark’s promotion, and Adina hugs the tank of lobsters as if she can save them.
It is now the 1980s, and everyone in her neighborhood listens to music and dances to moves from MTV. Jen, Jen, Janae, Joy, and Jiselle are the popular girls in eighth grade. Adina’s mother learns that Mark is married. Adina’s mother buys soil and establishes a garden. Toni mentions that she’s been invited over by Audrey, and Adina is jealous. When their teacher mentions that Arctic hares turn white in the winter, Adina’s class shares a rare moment of wonder and curiosity. Her mother takes Adina to midnight mass.
Part 1, Pages 58-87 Summary
Mrs. Leafhalter, a neighbor who occasionally babysits Adina, teaches her how to cross her legs. Around this time, Adina notices that the garden is growing. Nearby, a house from their neighborhood disappears into a sinkhole. Adina joins the swim team. One night, her mother forgets to pick her up, and Adina misses watching Cosmos. One day, they go to Beautyland again, and they learn of a serum to smooth curly hair.
Adina finds out that she has received a scholarship to a private high school. Before she begins, in the summer, Mrs. Leafhalter invites Adina to spend July at her cabin near the beach. Adina walks the boardwalk during the day and sees the group of J-named girls. She finds Mrs. Leafhalter slightly alarming. She talks with Dominic, who works at the Fotomat, but tries to avoid the sad, distant phone calls with her mother. One night, she and Mrs. Leafhalter watch Johnny Carson’s interview with Carl Sagan.
Janae invites Adina to be part of a group performing a dance to a hip hop song by Black Sheep. Adina is thrilled by the inclusion and the moves of the dance. One day, she and Dominic watch the boardwalk test a new roller coaster with sandbags standing in for members of a family. Meanwhile, Toni and Audrey have a fight, but Adina doesn’t know the details.
Right before the performance, Amadeo invites Adina to see his car. Inside, they kiss, but Adina isn’t interested in making out. He unbuttons his pants and invites her to perform oral sex. Adina laughs. Amadeo, offended, complains to Janae, and Janae kicks Adina out of the troupe. Dominic walks Adina home, and they witness a father chastising his son over a slice of uneaten watermelon. Adina feels disappointed and lonely and imagines her superiors faxing her consolatory messages.
At the end of July, her mother picks her up and Adina is affected upon returning home: “[I]t must be the opposite of homesickness, to return home to find it more beautiful, to return and still feel distance” (83), she thinks. Her mother’s garden has expanded. Settling back into their home lives, Adina and Dominic watch a lot of TV shows and movies when his family gets a VCR. Adina notes that, in alien movies, the alien always returns home. Adina feels sad and distant like a typical American teenager.
Part 1 Analysis
The novel is presented as a biography of Adina, beginning with the moment of her birth. Rather than evoking suspense around a question of Adina’s origins, Bertino immediately establishes that Adina is from a distant planet and has been sent to observe and report on humans. This premise will work, throughout the novel, on two levels: as a speculative element, strengthened by Adina’s belief in her alien identity, and, in the mode of literary realism, as a metaphor for how people can feel like outside observers gripped with The Desire for Belonging.
This theme emerges in many images and experiences of Adina’s, most vividly in the way she is drawn to aquatic life. She is soothed by the calm quiet of the aquarium and devastated by the harvesting of the lobsters at the Seafood Shanty. She explicitly meditates on her loneliness after she is expelled from the dance troupe by the popular girls, which enhances her sense of distance and lack of belonging. Bertino also suggests that this sense of isolation is a part of Adina’s natural development as she matures into an American teenager. The premise of Adina as both an actual alien and a metaphorical alien will continue throughout the novel.
Bertino explores parental love to highlight why people desire connection and belonging. She depicts most of the fathers as distant, uncaring, or even cruel, like the father Adina witnesses chastising his son over a slice of watermelon. This highlights Adina’s dependence on and attachment to her mother, described as the gravitational center of Adina’s world. In the absence of a father or other family—the only other adult in her life is the rather abrasive Mrs. Leafhalter—Adina’s wish for guidance and approval from her “superiors” reflects her longing for nurturance and connection. Bertino presents parental relationships as the foundation for Adina’s future relationships. Her jealousy over her best friend’s attachment to another girl adds to Adina’s painful experiences of relationships. Her experience with Amadeo also reveals to Adina that what she’s feeling is not sexual attraction but yearning for a different kind of connection. Her subsequent rejection by the popular girls is painful but, in a way, confirms Adina’s belief that she doesn’t belong in her society.
Supporting this extraterrestrial motif, Bertino uses cosmological events and discoveries to explore The Need for a Sense of Purpose. The biggest is the launch of Voyager I at her birth, represented as a kind of sibling: Both are probes searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Moments of violence and alienation also provide thresholds that spur Adina’s sense of purpose. Most significant is her father’s impatient shove, which results in young Adina falling down a set of concrete steps. This becomes the moment she is “activated,” which serves as a metaphor for finding a sense of purpose. Thereafter she lives a sort of dual life: daytimes on Earth, nights spent in the classroom, depicted as a nebulous, dream-like space which leaves open the possibility that Adina is imagining all these interactions.
The theme of Communication and the Limits of Language is introduced, somewhat humorously, in the discarded fax machine that Adina’s mother salvages. How these faxes work, technically speaking, is not information that the novel supplies. This is an example of the way Bertino incorporates the conventions of magical realism into the novel, as in this genre, magical or supernatural phenomena are rarely explained and instead are used to convey something about reality. The faxes facilitate Adina’s emotional and intellectual development; they are a kind of journal for reflecting on her observations and obsessions. They also become a way that Adina communicates with, and receives guidance from, others presumably outside her small, bounded world in Philadelphia. The fax is her connection to a larger world and purpose, but there is also the possibility—an ever-present irony—that Adina is faxing, and replying to, herself.
Carl Sagan becomes a recurring motif; his views on extraterrestrial life validate Adina’s mission. Adina’s curiosity about the larger universe is, in part, a quest to find her place in the world. Sagan is one of many references to popular culture and fashion, which provide points of material reference, showing how Adina is embedded in an earthly culture as well. For instance, she is drawn to the hip hop duo Black Sheep. Beautyland, established as an actual place, becomes a metaphor for the beauty and wonder of the world, in time standing in for Earth itself.
