Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple

A misanthropic matriarch leaves her eccentric family in crisis when she mysteriously disappears in this "whip-smart and divinely funny" novel that inspired the movie starring Cate Blanchett (New York Times).

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle -- and people in general -- has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, and secret correspondence -- creating a compulsively readable and surprisingly touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Reviewed by MurderByDeath on

4 of 5 stars

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I should be rating this one higher than I am; at least 4.5 stars.  I picked it up with the intention of just reading a page or two and suddenly two hours passed.  I couldn't stop reading it.   

But when I finished I just didn't feel that 4.5 star feeling.  We can blame it on a woeful job on the part of the copy editor (lots of missing words), for lack of anything else.  Because I really enjoyed the epistolary style, and I enjoyed the characters (except Soo-Lin; her, I wanted to smack and not for the obvious reasons).  The writing was excellent even without the full compliment of articles and conjunctions and a lot of it was funny.   

My only niggle was the ending felt abrupt; I'd have like a bit more information about what Bernadette and Elgin were going to do about those 'complications' at the end.

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  • Started reading
  • 27 May, 2016: Finished reading
  • 27 May, 2016: Reviewed