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.

Review: Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Title: Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Author: Jamie Ford
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: January 27, 2009
Source: Library
Find it Here: Amazon, Goodreads

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford's stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.

This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry's world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While "scholarshipping" at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship - and innocent love - that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.

Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel's dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family's belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice - words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.

Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.

My Thoughts:

I love historical fiction and I really wish I took the time to read a lot more of it. I had the opportunity to read Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because it was chosen as one of our book club reads! It’s a story that takes place in the eighties when the main character is getting older and it takes place, in flash backs, to WWII when the main character is a child navigating the world as a Chinese American with a Japanese American girlfriend.

Henry is about twelve years old in the early 1940’s and goes to a private school where he is picked on simply because he is Asian. There is a huge prejudice against the Japanese at this time because of Pearl Harbor and even though Henry is Chinese he is still lumped into the same group as the Japanese and bullied all the same. Henry soon meets Keiko, a Japanese American girl his age and they become fast friends. But soon the persecution of the Japanese becomes strong in Seattle and her family is forced in an internment camp. Even though they are determined to keep in touch and keep their friendship alive, it become inevitable that they can no longer keep their communications going.

I loved the characters in Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. They were so real and believable. Since this story is definitely character driven most of the time, great characters are essential. I also believe that a Chinese American boy and a Japanese American girl who are the only two Asians in their school would create a strong bond and stick together. I also love how this story explored what it means to be American and another nationality. Are you one more than the other and when is it time to become one more than the other. I found the dichotomy between Henry and his parents interesting and how they pushed him to be as American as he could be but wouldn't afford Keiko the same luxuries.  I could only imagine that WWII was a very difficult time to live through.

I loved Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet for the sheer fact that it shed light on a topic that Americans like to forget. Although it was a little slow in the beginning, I would definitely recommend it to history lovers.

Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Title: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Author: Robin Sloan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Girous
Source: Purchased
Find it Here: Goodreads, Amazon

Global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, young love, and the secret to eternal life — mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore. The Great Recession shuffles Clay Jannon from his web-design drone job to night shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Curiously, few customers come in repeatedly and never buy. Analysis reveals astonishing secrets ...

My thoughts:

I heard about this book a little while ago and ever since I read the synopsis I knew I wanted to choose Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore for book club.  An independent bookstore that never closes, some kind of conspiracy going on with the patrons who only borrow books and never buy and a mystery that I was convinced would have me on the edge of my seat.  

Even though it was good and it was fun to read, it just wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be.  After reading the synopsis, I really thought that the patrons were going to be spies and that they were passing secret messages back and forth in the books they were borrowing.  But as it turns out, these mysterious patrons are trying to solve the secrets of the universe a.k.a. the secret to physical immortality.  These people in this cult are literally scrambling around, decoding all these books in the hopes that they will find some kind of code or recipe for a concoction that will grant them immortality.  

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is an adventure that was pretty fun to read.  Clay, the main character, and his quirky group of misfit friends set off to help Mr. Penumbra uncover what he has been searching for for many years.  Conveniently they have unlimited resources that allow them to travel to New York City at a moments notice and also allows them to get their hands on all the technology that they need.  By the end, when he happened to have connections to a librarian that got him what he needed, I felt that he was a little too lucky.  I liked the characters but I felt their only purpose was to help out Clay and Mr. Penumbra. They didn't have any depth and they were very static throughout the whole novel.  

Overall, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore was a fun book to read and very appropriate for the book club. And hey! The cover of the paperback is pretty cool! It glows in the dark! I give Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 3.5 stars for being entertaining and fun.