Our May read Were'd You Go, Bernadette, was chosen by Becky.
From Amazon:
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.
So I went to Goodreads in an attempt to find a review that properly stated the words I attempted to spew out of my mouth in regards to this book. I was amazed to see that all of the people who rated the book highly used the same kind of language to sing its praise. But after reading quite a few reviews, I now see like with all things, there is a . . . here I go again, not being able to put what's in my brain into print. Here's the last paragraph of a long review that came close to what I'm thinking and feeling: It gets one star for the readability & the drama. It lost all the other stars because I kind of hated its tone (every person in it uses the same voice, by the way), its content, its underlying assumptions, its message, I could go on...but I've wated enough time on it already. It's too bad that this brain candy/beach trash novel turned so icky for me.(
ReplyDeleteGo to Goodreads for the entire review, if you're interested. It's the one with ONE star. Overall I'd say that I found the book to be a good terrible book - I mean, if you're going to be terrible, do it well, right? And, something that stayed present in my mind while reading it is, there are people who really do live like this. Lots of them. Gives you something to think about.