Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple

[goodreads]

Title: Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Author: Maria Semple
Genre: Fiction, Epistolary
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 330 pages
Date read: August, 2014

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 a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It 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, secret correspondence - creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.


Smart, funny, awesome book. I enjoyed every minute of it.

It's an epistolary novel, which I know isn't for everybody, but personally a good book tends to be even better if it's written in that form - so I was inclined to like it even before I started.

But even so, the book lived up to and even exceeded my expectations. It was brilliantly clever, and I simply couldn't put it down. I loved the twists and turns the novel took, and how the epistolary form meant that we got many sides of each story.

My only problem with the book is that it's too short!