About Book:

A whip-smart, hysterical dramedy about a family in crisis after the disappearance of its brilliant, misanthropic matriarch.

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.

About Author:

Maria Semple wrote for the television shows Arrested Development, Ellen and Mad About You. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times. She lives in Seattle.

• Paperback:352 pages
• Publisher:Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 2013)

My Review:

I heard so much about this book and really looking forward in reading and to learn that they were making a movie about it although I really enjoyed this book – even though it wasn’t remotely what I was expecting. Told through a series of narrators, with emails, letters, and texts, this is a tightly-woven contemporary epistolary novel. Chapters were long and seemed to drag.  There’s also basically no closure. It ends with a letter sent before the final event in the book and so the reader learns nothing about what actually happens just what that character hoped for   I have seen some of the reviews on this. And they were 5 stars; I maybe the only one that is giving it 3 stars; like I said I enjoyed it, but it just wasn’t my style. There was a long waiting list at my local library to read it, I was at the point that I was going to purchase it through my kindle account, I am so glad that it came available through my library and I didn’t have to waste my money in buying it.