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A self confessed bookworm. I needed a place to debrief after reading, so here it is!

Friday, July 22, 2016

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

“My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.” 

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.

What a funny Mum Bernadette would have been. A little crazy at times, but there'd never be a dull moment. There really is a fine line between genius and madness.

There were a few sections where I skim read because it was dragged out a tad too long, but otherwise this book had some really funny parts - the landslide paragraphs actually made me laugh out aloud. 

It had been on my 'To Read' list for a while and I'm glad I finally got around to it. Easy enough to read that I could be absorbed in it, but interesting enough that I actually wanted to keep reading longer than I could at times.

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