Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Synopsis: 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.
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery
Review: I had never heard of this book until one of my coworkers lent me the book and forced me to read it recently. When I picked it up, I was deep in my book hangover from The Sun Is Also A Star, Once this book really got going, it cured me of my book hangover very quickly.
This book is truly a bit of a mystery. It’s a conglomeration of emails, interview transcripts, and classic narrated dialogue that hint toward events the reader is unaware of. The main narrator is Bee, whose eccentric mother Beatrice is the scandalous topic around which the book buzzes. The reader gleans hints and clues from the various documentation provided and is left to make judgment about the characters based on their various interactions and the tidbits we are given along the way. Until the big event happens.
Where’d You Go, Beatrice? is so difficult to describe! It’s very non-traditional, but follows a similar pattern to books like The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma, where you know something has happened, but you’re not sure quite what it is until all the puzzle pieces fall into place later. This book is very unique in the sense that it almost feels like a caricature of itself, though it is placed in modern times. Its eccentricities create an interesting bubble of the Seattle, Washington we know that belongs solely to the world Semple has created for the reader.
I will say that my four-star rating may be slightly biased due to the fact that it took me a while to get it started because of my intense book hangover, so it felt very slow and colloquial during the first half. But I do think I’ve found that I’m not the biggest fans of books like these. I find that when the plot seems driven by one event which is unknown to the reader, it is difficult to keep the reader entertained. I enjoyed the book, but I only had a few moments where I was really touched and I never grew particularly attached to any of the characters, so I was really in it to find out exactly what happened, which is resolved relatively quickly at the end.
I also did notice that this book is fairly white. I believe it addresses that at one point or another, but there really is no excuse for not including people of different backgrounds and ethnicities. Even when traveling internationally, the characters are all of white European descent, which could have been easily rectified to provide some diversity. A small strike against it, but a notable one.
All in all, I did enjoy this book. If you’re looking for a unique and fun read to pass the time, this would be a good choice. It isn’t a book I’m dying to reread in the future, but not one I regret either. If you’ve read it, or decide to read it after reading this review, let me know what you think, because I’m interested to hear other takes on it!
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