Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Little, Brown and Company - August 1, 2012
335 pages

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 be, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her family 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 obscene world.

(Spoiler level: Major in the third paragraph)

Let's start with the news praise: OMG this book is totally hilarious and full of heart with lots of crazy twists and amazing, unforgettable characters and everyone should buy this because it's so totally amazing! A+++ (okay, hopefully no magazine actually said that, but you get everything that's being said about the book)

Now for my praise: The book is completely fast-moving. It's an epistolary novel consisting mostly of emails between Bernadette and her virtual assistant in India as well as Bernadette's nemesis Aubrey Griffin and her friend Soo-Lin Segal. While I don't normally enjoy epistolary novels, I found this one to be quick. There are also little breaks of straight information. Bee and Bernadette are fully-developed characters with dreams, hopes, etc.

And finally my problems: First and foremost, the ending seems completely rushed. Everything was wrapped up way too soon. It especially felt wrong in that Semple makes it sound like everything's going to be okay when the circumstances say that in no real situation it would be okay. If you ran away from home and your husband is the baby daddy of a coworker, things are not going to be okay. Period. End of story. Second, everyone says that this book is hilarious, but there were very few points that I found truly funny. Third, Bee and her friend Kennedy are 15-year-olds in eighth grade. I understand that Bee would be a year behind, because she was born with heart defects that led to multiple surgeries. But Kennedy is totally normal and therefore should be thirteen turning fourteen, not fourteen turning fifteen. There is no explanation as to why she would be a year behind.

In a nutshell: Everyone adores this book. It's fast with a couple of remarkable characters, but the ending feels incomplete, it's not as funny as everyone says, and there's no explanation as to why eighth graders are fifteen.

Grade: B