“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.”– Bernadette
Where’d You go Bernadette? by Maria Semple is a book some should be able to jive with in the most adulterous way. Whoever reads this book will lose sleep, become fatigued by lack of eating, ignore significant others and quite possibly put off homework until the last word on the last page has been read.
The story surrounds a missing, somewhat neurotic wife and mother, Bernadette Fox. She suffers from agoraphobia and is a compulsive perfectionist in every sense. She made a name for herself in the architectural world and has become quite the prominent figure.
Everything seems to be going perfect, until it all escalates out of control. The family consists of Bernadette, Elgin and Bee, the beloved protagonist. She is a sassy fifteen-year-old girl going through social angst. The reader might say she does not bode well with the other students. Plus, she is laugh-out-loud hilarious. The Fox family are outcasts in the neighborhood they just moved into.
It is the rich, noses-in-the-air type of suburb. One day, Bee returns home from school with her report card full of only A’s. The deal was that if she received perfect grades then the family would take a trip to Antarctica; a place she has been wishing to visit her whole life. Showing her mother her grades was of utmost importance, but her mother is nowhere to be found. As the desperation kicks in, Bee and her father begin searching emails and transcripts from Bernadette’s computer to see if there are any clues as to her whereabouts. Throughout the book the reader sits sidecar with Bee going full throttle.
They read what she reads, feels what she felt, all the while trying to figure out the mysterious disappearance of Bernadette. Throughout these pages the reader will experience human emotions that most feel daily. Where’d you go Bernadette? kicks the reader mentally in the gut in two ways. First, it will have the reader crying with tears of hilarity. Second, it will have the reader feeling what it’s like when one misses another human. The reader obtains a strong connection to both Bernadette and Bee in a very authentic way.
“Escaping the benality of school is hard to do sometimes, but reading a book like Where’d ya go Bernadette just might help you feel human for a while.”
