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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Massive Star (School)”
Part 2, Pages 91-107 Summary
It’s 1991 and exoplanets are discovered orbiting a pulsar in the constellation Virgo. Dominic drives Toni and Adina to their high school for the first day of classes. Adina “at thirteen is an underweight, near-sighted extraterrestrial with an aversion to mouth noises” (92). A blonde girl named Dakota explains that on a girl’s birthday, friends give her balloons, and Adina is immediately worried that she won’t receive any. In the night classroom, Adina’s new mentor is a shape that she calls Solomon. In her high school, Adina’s Italian class is translating The Little Prince. Toni, who rides the bus with her from their neighborhood, remains Adina’s closest friend. Meanwhile, Adina’s mother is promoted to administrative assistant at work.
On her birthday, Adina intentionally misses the bus, and her mother drives her to school. On the way, her mother reflects on how so many people don’t talk in cars, using this as a metaphor to suggest that too many people are literalists and don’t have a sense of humor. Despite her dread at reaching school, Adina receives several balloons. This is because, as Toni says, she is funny. However, rather than feeling proud, Adina feels embarrassed. She takes her many balloons to Toni’s house, and she and Dominic destroy them. Her mother is impressed by Adina’s detached attitude. That Saturday, Adina and her mother drive to the beach and drink wine to celebrate Adina’s birthday. Adina feels a bit embarrassed by her mother, especially her outdated control-top pantyhose. Adina is also upset because she struggles with Italian.
Part 2, Pages 108-121 Summary
In the night classroom, Solomon helps Adina study Italian, and she understands that the book they are translating, The Little Prince, is “a parable about purpose” (108). After Adina performs brilliantly in class, the professor accuses her of cheating. Back at home, Adina tries to follow the beauty tips in magazines and asks her mother about her makeup colors.
Adina is praised for her performance in acting class, and the moment is memorable for her. At home with her mother, she watches the last episode of the TV sitcom Cheers and feels deeply sad. Furthermore, the glib response to her fax, that endings are hard, makes Adina feel alone. At school, Adina auditions for the school play, Our Town, and her teacher asks why she chose a passage from In the Name of the Father rather than Moonstruck, a movie about an Italian American woman. Nevertheless, Adina is cast as the narrator, the biggest role in Our Town. Adina therefore experiments with her stage makeup, and her mother tells her that she has her whole life to be a “slave” to the cosmetic industry. While exploring makeup, Adina noticed that the movie Boomerang causes beauty magazines to expand their color palette. Meanwhile, Dominic moves to New York.
Toni discovers the folder with Adina’s faxes and asks about them. Adina recalls the films and TV shows that she’s seen about how humans interact with aliens, and it always ends with exposure, exploitation, or pain. Though she wants to connect, Adina believes that she must keep her secret to remain safe. She fears that this will create a rift between her and Toni.
Part 2, Pages 121-131 Summary
Toni asks again about Adina’s notes as they drive together in Dominic’s Mustang. Adina feels that she can’t expose herself. Meanwhile, Adina’s mother shows off her expanding garden.
On the night of the play, Adina’s mother arrives extra early. The performance is an electric experience for Adina, and the applause is thunderous. Adina realizes, “By speaking another person’s words onstage, [she] has connected to so many humans” (125). Adina has a sudden image of her father.
A city college offers a theater scholarship, and both Adina and Dakota apply. Since their time in high school is coming to an end, Toni and Adina drive to the mall to shop for prom. There, Toni asks if Adina also writes the responses to her notes. They run into Audrey, and things are awkward between her and Toni. With Toni’s brother Matteo, they shop for get-well cards for Toni’s mother, who is frequently ill. Adina wonders if they can be friends if they are keeping secrets, and Toni decides to explain what happened with Audrey.
Part 2, Pages 131-140 Summary
Toni describes how Audrey invited her to the family’s swim club, and fellow members insulted Toni because she had a dark tan. Toni had a crush on Audrey, who didn’t like her back. For revenge, Toni gave one of the pool boys a handjob, and Audrey was furious. Inspired to share similarly, Adina reveals that she is from another planet. Toni accepts this, replying that Adina is different; she doesn’t fit in and she doesn’t lie.
Dakota wins the scholarship to the city college. Later, Solomon visits the night classroom to tell Adina that her lessons are at an end, but her duty of observation must continue. He tells Adina her real name. When she wakes, she is “devastated to find herself on Earth” (136).
As Toni and Adina sit apart at prom, Dakota comes to confess that she didn’t even want the acting scholarship, and her mother paid a college professor to write Dakota’s essay. She is not, however, going to refuse the scholarship, which would have meant that it could pass to Adina.
Toni moves to New York City. Adina gets a job as a server and applies to community college. She experiences painful episodes, similar to anxiety, that she refers to as “Something Else.” Toni writes letters, but Adina feels that she doesn’t have anything to say in return. Adina tries to explain her sense of loneliness and alienation to her superiors, who reply with, “better” (140).
Part 2 Analysis
The section describing Adina’s experience of high school is shorter than Part 1 but extends its explorations of the major themes. This part introduces an allusion to The Little Prince, a 1943 novel written by French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It is a fable, a quest story, and an exploration of meaning. Adina picks up on and shares the novel’s oft-quoted aphorism: “What is essential is invisible to the eye" (108). This provides a metaphor for Adina’s own explorations as she attempts to perceive and articulate the mechanisms of human connection and The Desire for Belonging. These connections manifest in visible ways—such as the camaraderie that she feels with her mother at her birthday, or the way Dominic and Toni understand her—but their workings are invisible and mysterious to Adina.
Her mother is still an important, anchoring figure in Adina’s life, and Adina articulates her advice and opinions—her sense of disgust over the ritual of the birthday balloons, for example, or the observation of how so many people are literalists without a sense of humor—which reflects the shaping influence that a parent has on a child’s life. However, Adina’s friendships and relationships at school take precedence in this chapter. Her struggle to learn Italian, and then the sudden distrust when she becomes proficient overnight, provides a metaphor for Adina’s larger struggle to comprehend this high school world, where she feels different primarily because of her socioeconomic background. The acting teacher’s response to why Adina would choose an audition monologue far distant from her own experience is just one of many ways in which people around Adina don’t understand why she strives to know more about the world.
Adina’s interest in discovery is implied in the reference to the discovery of exoplanets (planets outside the solar system), marking Adina’s expanding comprehension of the world. However, this is also the section in which her sense of loneliness and alienation becomes pronounced enough that she reflects on and attempts to articulate it. This creates a pessimistic tone, since the more that Adina knows of the universe, the more alone she feels.
Bertino further explores Communication and the Limits of Language as Adina’s attempts at communication with her friends or superiors are often abrogated or ineffective, and she continually struggles to express herself. Her reluctance to confide in Toni highlights her fear of being seen as different, something that impacts her ability to connect. The final confession is an anti-climactic moment when Toni accepts Adina’s revelation with acceptance and without discussion. However, this connection is strained, as is her friendship with Dominic, when Toni, too, moves away. Similarly, when Dakota takes the acting scholarship, Adina sees her life choices narrowing, not expanding alongside her knowledge of the universe. Participating in the play—as the narrator and omniscient observer, reflecting her alien role on Earth—offers the one moment when Adina feels truly accepted by and connected with others. In a crushing irony, a girl who doesn’t even want the scholarship takes away Adina’s opportunity for further connection by studying acting. Dakota is a girl whose mothering, sense of belonging, and achievements have made her a foil to Adina from the start.
The balloons offer a metaphor for Adina’s character dilemma. She wants to belong, but when she receives the balloons, she is embarrassed and upset by this ritual, and “killing” the balloons with Dominic becomes a way to protest her own participation in a popularity contest. The feeling of connection after her performance is of a far different quality, when she imagines people who aren’t there seeing and admiring her. However, just like getting kicked out of the dance troupe, losing the scholarship is part of a series of disappointments that make Adina feel more isolated and overlooked. The disappointments threaten The Need for a Sense of Purpose.
Reflecting Adina’s confused sense of purpose, the title of Part 2, “Massive Star,” offers a metaphor for Adina’s life experience in this section. Stars with great mass burn immense amounts of fuel quickly, leading to greater luminosity and shorter lifespan than stars with lesser mass. They end their life as a supernova, an intensely bright and powerful explosion. The remains can include heavy metals, a nebula, and sometimes a black hole, which is how Adina will feel about her restaurant work in Part 3.
