Book Review of
Where’d You Go Bernadette
A whip-smart, hysterical dramedy about a family in crisis after the disappearance of its brilliant, misanthropic matriarch.
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.
Lynn's Review
I tend to avoid new release fiction books that gets a ton of press and that everyone says is a must read. That means I am not up on all the current trendy books, but it also means that I can see if a book holds to the test of time. In other words, I want to see if people are still talking about it a few year later. Where’d You Go Bernadette falls into this category.
Everyone was reading it four or five years ago. I saw it everywhere. It was in bookstores and all over social media and blogs. So I avoided it. I sounded a little odd, and I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it. Well, it is 2018, and people are still talking about this book. Everyone is still saying that it is a must read. So I finally read it.
And I loved it. It is a bit quirky and odd, but I read it in two days. Once I got into the book, I could not put it down.