If
she aces her report card, precocious Bee Branch, the 15-year-old narrator of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, is
promised a trip by her over-the-top, over-achieving parents. But when Bee--an
only child, born with heart problems--makes perfect grades and picks Antarctica
as the family destination, all hell breaks loose.
Bee's
mother, Bernadette Fox, a once-renowned architect, has been in an anxious,
emotional funk for years that has forced her to outsource the minutiae of her
life (at a rate of 75 cents per hour) to a woman in India. It doesn't help
matters that Bee's father, Elgin Branch, a workaholic bigwig at Microsoft,
uprooted the family from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city Bernadette feels has
"zero architectural integrity," is filled with "the slowest
drivers you ever saw" and has become overrun with tourists and overly
compassionate do-gooders. Add a meddling, Seattle-born secretary at Microsoft
and a neighbor obsessed with destroying Bernadette because she views her as
rude and antisocial, and what emerges is an acerbic, dark, satirical comedy.
The day before the family's departure, Bernadette, who is dreading the South
Pole vacation, disappears. Amid the search, surprising discoveries are made and
bombshells are dropped.
Semple (This One Is Mine) was once a writer for the TV programs, Arrested
Development and Mad About You. She stitches together this funny,
inventive story via e-mails, letters, FBI reports, magazine articles and
interspersed narrative passages told in Bee's voice. This fresh, original
dramatic structure brings levity to harrowing and complex domestic issues.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette:
A Novel by Maria Semple
Little, Brown and
Company, $25.99, Hardcover, 9780316204279, 352 pp
Publication Date: August 14,
2012
To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE
Please note:
This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form)
with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (8/17/12), click HERE.