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Once again, I didn't want to read a highly recommended book. Once again, I was wrong. Where'd You Go, Bernadette, touted as "Divinely funny" (according to the NY Times) is, in actuality, a thinly veiled enormously tender family drama. It deals with a Seattle mother who is just on this side of sane, some of the time. And then sometimes she crosses over into a little crazy place and stays there for a while. To be fair, Maria Semple's descriptions of Seattle, the rain, the people, the streets, the drivers, the parents and kids all with their own nonsense, are funny. I've lived in Seattle, I get it.

The novel is, for the most part, a series of emails flying back and forth between the characters. However there is a narrator, Bee, the 15 year old daughter of the sightly mentally mixed up mother. The father, as it turns out, is a most valuable person at Microsoft and thus it is perfectly logical that the characters reveal themselves through the expediency of email. And characters there are. My favorite is Audrey. A helicopter parent in denial to end all helicopter parents in denial.

Bernadette, an award winning architect consumed by paranoiac fears, lives with her daughter and husband in a "living" house, literally. The vegetation is intruding into the house from under the floorboards and through the walls. Bernadette just can't seem to get around to the much needed renovations. Bee, promised whatever she wishes for stellar grades, comes home from school with said grades insisting that the family take a vacation cruise to Antarctica. This pushes Bernadette over the edge. She hates being around people, she gets terribly seasick and really is a tad bit agoraphobic. She even has a virtual "personal assistant" in India to deal with "life" as she feels herself to be incapable. (There is a charming sub plot revolving around the virtual assistant I am not discussing in this review.) As the time nears to leave, the husband realizes that what Bernadette really needs is a time out in a mental institution rather than a trip to Antartica. He stages an intervention that goes awry. Now the main story and the peripheral stories start spinning delightfully out of control. Bernadette escapes before she can be institutionalized. She just disappears. Father and daughter are left behind to grapple with the fallout. Layered within this mayhem are touching observations of a family trying to find its way. Father and daughter decide to take the Antartica trip. Bee is convinced that her mother did find her way onto an Antartica cruise (which is true) and is missing rather than dead (as her father assumes). On the same cruise liner that her mother has taken, the hunt for her mother begins but to no avail. Her mother can not be found on the ship or at one of the scheduled stops in Anartica despite the trail of receipts and bar tabs she has left behind. The father, thinking Bernadette somehow is lost overboard, is doing his best to help Bee confront reality. It doesn't work. Bee knows her mother always "had her back" and just wouldn't abandon her. She just wouldn't throw herself overboard regardless of the number of drinks the bar tab show she consumed.

I will stop here just short of the denouement. It is a delightful book filled to the brim with tales of the human condition. As I write this review, it has been raining all day. A satisfying reminder of Seattle.

Joanne Matzenbacher
Editor, It's About Books