Adina is secretly an extra-terrestrial in a human body, born
to a human mother, and has been sent to report on the life of earthlings. She
communicates with her alien people by fax surreptitiously. Her communiques are filled with keen observations,
although occasionally she draws an errant but humorous conclusion. She sends wise reflections on irrational
human behaviors, customs, and beliefs to her superiors, but their replies are
terse and not exactly encouraging. Even
so, Adina longs to fit in with her human counterparts but is an alien in
numerous ways. When asked to report on a
sporting event, she describes the grass, the players, their interactions with
the coaches, but nothing about the outcome.
Her response to her exasperated editor is that everyone knows the
outcome, and her readers surprisingly agree.
Adina eventually discovers that her missives to another world are of
interest to her fellow humans on Earth, and she receives a more positive
response from her human audience than she ever received via fax. One thing that
I did not like about this book is the format.
I prefer traditional chapter breaks, but this novel, although the
timeline is sequential, has a break every few paragraphs, making it feel a
little choppy to me. Still, I found
Adina’s story tender and hopeful about humankind in a way that
Theo
of Golden is not. It also
does what
Orbital
failed to do, which is move you.
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