Book Review: Where'd you go, Bernadette - M. Semple

“That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.” 

Loved this novel! I kept them in my TBR pile for ages, I kept putting it off and this summer I finally decided to read it - why did I not do it before? It is a brilliant novel, both for the plot, the characters and the writing style. It did not remind me of anything else i read before, so it was very refreshing.
Bernadette is a legend, she is so funny and, even if she clearly has some issues, what she does and says is what a lot of times all of us would like to do and say. The satire with with Seattle's Mercedes and Subaru parents are described is hilarious, and the Microsoft's culture where her husband work is really interesting to read about too.
The novel is written in the form of letters, emails, bits of narration for Bee, Bernadette's daughter, who is the real force of the book, a wise and sweet teenager.
This book never lets you down and he has a lot of plot's twist so you never imagine where it is going to take you.
If you think about it beyond the humour, it is quite a sad story, Bernadette has quite a lot of unresolved problems and her husband is not such a nice person as it appears at the beginning. The poor Bee is also under a lot of pressures in the books.
The ending is a bit abrupt maybe.but overall this book is brilliant and I would highly recommend it to anybody.

“I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn't fall, because Mom was in the world.” 

Overall rating: 8,5      Plot: 8,5     Writing style: 9      Cover:  8

Title:Where'd you go, Bernadette
Author: Maria Semple
Publisher: W&N
Pages: 336
Publication year: 2012

Plot:

To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife.
To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace.
To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect.
And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, quite simply, mum.

Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the earth to find her.

The Author:

From the author's web page:

Maria Semple spent her early years traveling around Europe with her bohemian parents, but that ended abruptly when her father, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., finished a pilot for Batman while living in Torremolinos, Spain. He airmailed it in, they shot it, and the family moved to LA.  After the Batman TV series and feature, Lorenzo went on to write a bunch of movies. Once he was established, the family moved to Aspen, Colorado.Maria attended boarding school at Choate Rosemary and college at Barnard, where she majored in English.Maria moved to LA shortly after graduating Barnard and wrote screenplays which never got made, and then TV shows. 90210, Mad About You, Arrested Development and others. She quit to give fiction a try.This One Is Mine was published by Little, Brown in 2008.In 2008 Maria, George Meyer and their little daughter moved to Seattle just because. It was a difficult adjustment for Maria, which became the basis for Where’d You Go, Bernadette. The novel came out in 2012 and became an instant bestseller. Today Will Be Different is her latest.