Earthlings Summary
Sayaka Murata

Earthlings Overview

In Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, 11-year-old Natsuki suffers abuse at home and at school. Luckily, though, she has magical powers given to her buy a stuffed hedgehog who is an alien from another planet. She makes a pact with her cousin in which they promise to do anything to survive childhood until they can become adults and start living their own independent lives. However, when they grow up, they find themselves still stuck in the lives their families have planned for them. Fed up with the inauthenticity of their lives, they decide to take matters into their own hands. The novel explores conformity, isolation, imagination, abuse, and gender.