“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. “
The book is told in a unusual format, what’s called a “epistolary.”
Basically, it unfolds through masses of email messages, along with chunks of
official documents and (not so) secret correspondences (I’ve encountered this
style one time before, in Steve Kluger’s brilliantly hilarious 1998 novel Last
Days of Summer). While it may distract
some folks, the book gets going very quickly and any reader will find
themselves wrapped up in the narrative.
One of the biggest strengths of Where'd You Go, Bernadette
is that it’s often weird, funny and sometimes serious all at the time. And
because author Maria Semple's background is in television comedy (she wrote for
Arrested Development) her zingers are spot on, as she gets some great digs at
Seattle, Canadians, self-help culture and the our odd private school system ,“a
place where compassion, academics and global connectitude join together to
create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet,” and where
there are only three grades: S for “Surpasses Excellence,” A for “Achieves
Excellence” and W for “Working Towards Excellence.”
The sad part is, as much as Semple pokes fun at it,
somewhere this is going on.
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