Hardcover, 330 pages
English language
Published April 4, 2012 by little, Brown and Company.
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.
What is an accomplished L.A. architect winning a Grand Award doing in Seattle. And what does this have to do with Antarctica?
Love this book. You also learn interesting facts about the cold desert continent and other things.
I’m grateful this was recommended to me, because I doubt I’d have picked it up after seeing trailers for the film version (which seems to be quite a misfire, though this material would be immensely challenging to adapt—Blanchett, however, is perfect for the part). Semple employs a “found documents” format that’s normally grating but in this case is downright essential to capturing the complex, contradictory whirlwind that is Bernadette. The result is a flawed and fascinating character I never wanted to let go of. The wrap-up is a little too tidy in places, but the journey is magnificent.
Once you get past the chick-lit cover, and the amusing and scathing critiques of suburban parenthood that the book begins with, you’ll find a tour de force presented via correspondence of multiple characters, which explores the perils of ignoring one’s powers of creativity.
I just finished "Where'd You Go, Bernadette." It was just perfect for my mood at that moment. I thought Ollie-O was very funny and there was just the right amount of that level of silly satire of marketing/management-speak. I was much more taken with the story of 20 mile house and the cruise and found the affair story line distracting. It would've been more fun to get a bit more of the Microsoft culture and Elgin story.
The mystery was also the perfect morsel-size for me. I don't care for mystery as a genre, but there was just enough vanishing, investigating, piecing improbable clues, and happy discovery in the final portion of the book.
Reads like a female version of a Douglas Cope,and book.i enjoyed it but was frustrated by the flow through the last third of the book.
Funny and touching book about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but also sufficiently concerned with bigger picture women's issues to rise above its chic-lit subject matter.
Nice, optimistic book.
I adored this book, and recommended it to all my friends -- several of whom read it, and loved it, too. It's a modern day epistolary novel. Instead of the characters writing long letters to each other, you're reading emails, the newsletter from her daughter's private school, news articles, blog posts. Oh, it's wonderful. Seattle is skewered (and loved). Bernadette, her daughter, and her husband are wonderful characters.
