Review- Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Title: Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Author: Maria Semple
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Release Date: January 01, 2012
Source: Purchased
Find it Here: Amazon, Goodreads

Bernadette Fox has vanished.

When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces.

Which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are, and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.

My Thoughts: 

100 page evaluation: Where'd You Go Bernadette is definitely a different type of book. A narrative broken up by emails and hand written letters and notes.  I liked it at first but then it started to get a little slow.  Bernadette let's too many little things bother her to the point of obsession. It's a little bit annoying. And I thought by 100 pages the story would have progressed more than it already has. Still interested to see how it ends and what the rest of the book club has to say about it.  

As you can see, Where'd You Go, Bernadette was a book we read for book club a couple of months ago.  I don't know why it has taken me so long to write a review for but here we are, months down the road and I'm just now writing it. When it's all said and done, I can say I have never really read a character quite like Bernadette. In both a good and bad way. She takes everything to the utmost extreme. For example, she promised God that if He let her baby live, she would never create art again to the extreme that she wouldn't keep up the house and roots and dirt were literally coming through the floor boards. She also hated all the other mothers at her daughter's school to the point that she had a feud going with some of them. So the whole book was pretty weird and she didn't even go missing til almost the end of the book.  

Elgin, her husband, was also very weird. Doesn't pay attention to anything that's going on with his wife or his family. Did he even realize his house was falling apart? As soon as something goes wrong in his marriage, he has an affair with a woman at work and, shocker, gets her pregnant. Let's his teenage daughter talk them into taking an outrageous trip to Antarctica. All the characters in Where'd You Go, Bernadette are so weird. It's just a weird book all around. 

If you don't mind reading a book from all different perspective, from emails, IM chats and written notes than you might like this book. But beware, the characters are weird and extremely outrageous.