Where'd You Go, Bernadette (edition 2012)

"The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us. Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky. Twinkling, joyous sunlight; airy, giggling cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink, flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless." ( )

Bernadette Fox is a reclusive former architect who abandoned her promising career when the Huge Hideous Thing happened to her. Now living with her husband and exceptionally bright middle-school-aged daughter, Bee, in Seattle, Bernadette makes an eccentric character, to say the least. She refuses to participate in Bee’s private school programming, hates leaving the house, rants about everything from Canadians to the difficulty of parking in Seattle, and hires a virtual assistant in India to carry out even her most basic tasks.

When Bee asks for a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for earning straight A’s (S’s actually, because she goes to “one of those liberal, grades-erode-self-esteem-type schools”), everything begins to fall apart. Paired with her already strained mental state and a feud with a neighbor over some wild-growing blackberry bushes, the prospect of cruising the Antarctic with her debilitating motion sickness is too much for Bernadette. She vanishes, leaving her husband, an influential Microsoft executive, and Bee to pick up the pieces.

Desperate to find her missing mother, Bee sifts through emails, notes, magazine articles, invoices, letters from the school, and other correspondence for clues. In doing so, she assembles a picture of her mother that she never saw before, including the event that unravelled her career and damaged her psyche.

Where’d You Go Bernadette is written in an epistolary format, and the story is made up of the various communications Bee reads as she tries to make sense of Bernadette’s disappearance and figure out where she is.

I really enjoyed this novel and can see why it’s gotten so much attention! The epistolary format was an interesting approach, as the various correspondences allow us to see Bernadette through many lenses — her daughter, her husband, other moms at Bee’s school, architects she worked with, and her own narration.

This would make a perfect beach read this summer, if you haven’t read it yet. It’s really funny — I may have laughed out loud a few times (okay, many times) — and on the lighter side, but I wouldn’t call it fluffy. It’s quite smart, and although I thought the story got a little bit convoluted toward the middle, it was a lot of fun to read!

More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes. ( )

Bernadette is a bit of a mystery when we meet her. She struggles with social interaction, but we don’t know why. She would do anything for her daughter Bea, including plan a trip to Antarctica despite her dislike of crowds. Her husband Elgin spends most of his time hard at work at Microsoft and doesn’t seem to notice that his wife is slowly spiraling farther away from her family. The book is really about one family’s struggle with success, failure and all of the hills and valleys in between.

Slowly the story of Bernadette’s life unfolds and her attitudes begin to make sense. As she struggles to hang on to her sanity in suburbia you find yourself rooting for her regardless of the situation. When Bernadette goes missing her daughter tries to piece together a trail of communication that might offer some clue to what happen. Letters, emails, newspaper articles, and more make up the bulk of the text. This format works so well, giving the reader multiple points of view and a wider picture of the whole plot.

Between Bernadette’s diatribes about Seattle and the dramatic whining of her neighbor Audrey, the book is so funny. The author wrote for Arrested Development so I had a feeling I’d love her sense of humor, but the characters deal with big issues and are complex enough to make you care deeply about what happens to them.

BOTTOM LINE: At times hilarious, at others heartbreaking the book is seriously good. It made me laugh out loud and still had enough depth to stick with me. A perfect summer read!

p.s. I LOVED the audio version, just wonderful. ( )

Seattle life satire—you have to wade through the pages of praise for its hilarity before you entire the satire itself. B. Simmons

I found this a surprising inclusion in this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist. It is cleverly put together and entertaining enough, but a very light read. ( )