A psychologically rich portrait of a teenage girl suspended between the rituals of 1990s girlhood and the otherworldly possibilities that beckon her
Squeezing onto a cramped bus seat after the driver forces kids to make room, contorting herself into a bathroom stall so she won’t be seen while skipping class, banking calories like a form of penance, guarding a private diary from a younger sibling—such is the life of Daisy, an anxious teenage girl growing up in late‑1990s Arizona, feeling unseen in all the ways that matter. In Terrestrial, Suzy Eynon painstakingly renders adolescence as a series of quiet humiliations and the desperate, private rituals that help a young person survive the disorienting moments that register as nothing at all in the lives of her peers and parents.
Daisy’s inner world is shaped by a constellation of fixations that reveal both her longing for escape and her craving for routine. She becomes absorbed by the idea that her city of Mountain Lake might be a hub for alien activity, seeking reprieve in the possibility that, despite her deepest insecurities at the thought of being perceived, something extraordinary might be paying attention to her when the people around her aren’t. Outgrown friendships are left feeling like phantom limbs, and her parents seem just as spectral, despite their presence under the same roof.
But just as powerful as Daisy’s extraterrestrial hypothesis is her rotation of the same five after-school flicks—namely, her well-worn VHS copy of Disney’s Tom & Huck—that she watches while daydreaming from her parents’ bed. Daisy gravitates toward adventure stories because they offer a version of the agency and escape she can’t find in her own life, imagining herself as both the hero she longs to be and the one she longs for.
Fiercely protective of her extracurricular routine, Daisy fears the contamination of her “real life” by the homework assigned at the prison that is Saguaro Shade High. Equally, if not more threatening, is her snooping younger sister, Lindsay. For Daisy, the ultimate transgression is reading another person’s journal, that sacred space for testing out the power of one’s inner voice, a release she so desperately needs, given the belief that “Daisy expended an exorbitant amount of energy keeping quiet in the classroom or around campus, so much so that her voice was largely no longer accessible.”
What makesTerrestrial glow is not the plausibility of extraterrestrial life but rather Eynon’s ability to make legible in a compressed space the teenage experience of feeling suspended between two worlds. By artfully demonstrating how writing is a creative practice capable of stitching those worlds together, Eynon urges us all—no matter where we are personally suspended—to pick up a notebook and get to scribbling. Altogether, a thoughtful and poetic novella about what it means to grow amid the search of something bigger.
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