Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Author: Maria Semple

One-sentence summary: A creative and reclusive mom and wife goes missing after struggling for years to be herself, and her husband and daughter piece together the recent and distant past to find her.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: The humor.

Our least favorite thing about it: The format was a little hard to follow for all of us.

Main Topics of Discussion: Creativity, Parenthood, Marriage, School, Art, Seattle

Our favorite quote: “The past twenty years I’ve been in training for overwintering at the South Pole! I knew I was up to something.”

Notes: We all enjoyed this book. It was a good story with a lot of humor and commentary on Seattle, Canadians, private schools and various other things that had us literally laughing out loud. The humor alone is a reason to read this book. We thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of it.

The characters were just interesting enough and unpredictable, although we felt that some acted unrealistically. (Like Audrey’s complete 180 degree turn regarding Bernadette.)

Our biggest complaint, which we mentioned several times in the course of our discussion, was the format. While we acknowledge that it gave the book a bit of novelty and sets it apart from the regular novel format, we had a hard time following the story because of it. Having to read who was writing to who, and figure out which character was speaking and in what setting was sometimes confusing to us and interrupted the flow. In addition, for a while, we had a hard time keeping the characters straight…and there aren’t that many. We attributed that to the letter format as well.

Overall, we would label this a witty and enjoyable book.

Memorable Meeting Moments: All the food, the sunflowers that Dara cut from the field and put in mason jars, meeting on a Friday night

What We Ate: Chicken enchiladas with roasted tomatillo chile salsa, black bean corn salsa, chips, sangria, and caramel toffee bars for dessert.