Where’d You Go Bernadette - review by Nicky Pellegrino

When I was growing up there was no such thing as Young Adult fiction.  You read kid’s books until eventually you moved on to adult ones.  Consequently I find it difficult to decide what falls within the genre. With its bright cover and teenage genius heroine Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple (W&N, $39.99) might be aimed at the younger market however its themes seem fairly adult and the humour often quite sophisticated so who can tell.

One thing is certain, whether it’s aimed at young or old, this is a very funny book. It begins with the disappearance of Bernadette Fox. Her sparky 15-year-old daughter Bee sets out to discover all she can about her Mum, compiling a missing person dossier of e-mails and documents. The story is told mostly through these fragments as well as extracts from Bee’s journal.

I’ll admit don’t always get on with novels with a bitsy structure like this. However, while the hodgepodge of reports, e-mails, press releases, articles, invoices and school newsletters does build into a story, it’s Bee’s voice that really makes things flow. Peppy and outspoken, she’s a heroine it’s a pleasure to spend time with.

Anyway it transpires that Bernadette is a radical architect who’s had a breakdown following a professional catastrophe and moved with her Microsoft wunderkind husband Elgie to a wreck of a house in Seattle where she’s at war with the neighbours and the other school mums despite hardly ever leaving her home.

Bernadette is a mess but still her daughter adores her. Things go from bad to worse when she agrees to a family trip to Antarctica and sets about organising it with the help of her virtual assistant in India. That’s when Elgie begins to seriously fear for his wife’s mental health and plans an intervention. The FBI become involved, neighbours machinate, colleagues plot – it’s a delicious high farce during which Semple gets to sink her satirical bite into everything from major corporates and posh schools to therapists.

With a 15-year career writing for shows like Ellen, Mad About You and Arrested Development, Semple knows all about creating great screwball comedy. There’s a particularly amusing series of e-mails between Bernadette’s crazy neighbor and Elgie’s predatory assistant. She can pace a story; ratcheting the hysteria then creating calm for poignancy. And she’s produced likeable if incredible characters.

Where’d You Go Bernadette is a brilliantly inventive, dark comedy with a baseline of acerbic social commentary. Entirely unpredictable, a real page-turner, and in places laugh out loud funny, I think this one is going to be a hit with adults young or old who are looking for a book to entertain and delight them and don’t have an issue with plots verging on the ridiculous. For them it’s recommended.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino,(right), an Auckland-based author of popular fiction is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 24 June, 2012.
Her next novel When In Rome is set in 1950s Italy and is due out in September this year