Read with Me: Where'd you go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

My recent discovery is Maria Semple - an American novelist and screenwriter whose 2012 novel Where'd you go Bernadette was made into a movie starring one of my favourite actresses Cate Blanchette in 2019. I haven't seen the film yet ( I got very excited when I heard it was out, but for some reason it didn't make it to the cinemas in Portugal where I live at the moment), but I have bought and read the book and it's a page turner!

One of the delightful things about the book is the epistolary genre it is written in. It is one of the almost forgotten genres where the narration is written in the form of letters (in our modern world e-mails and text messages), notes, diary entries, etc., thus creating several narrators, each with their specific voice, style and point of view.
The main characters of the book are a family consisting of Bernadette Fox - a former award-winning architect, an eccentric woman suffering from social anxiety and a mother to a sweet gifted 15-year-old daughter Bee who went through a series of gruelling heart surgeries when she was little; and Bernadette's husband and Bee's father Elgin Branch, a TEDTalks speaker and a team leader at Microsoft, working on an AI project.
The supporting characters are the staff of the school where Bee is studying, the parents of Bee's classmates, a virtual PA from India, who turns out to be someone else, and even the FBI.

The family, like any family has its trials and tribulations, but the situation spirals into a disaster leading to Bernadette's disappearance after the family starts planning a trip to Antarctica (Bee's graduation gift).

This book has crazy neighbours, venomous gossips, a house that leaks when it rains and grows blackberry bushes under the floorboards, a workplace fling, a detective story involving the FBI and the Russian mafia, and of course the cute penguins and magnificent icebergs of Antarctica.

An absolute pleasure to read: dramatic, funny, life-affirming book. Highly recommended.