Where <em>has</em> Bernadette gone? And why, in the course of the novel, does it take so long for her to physically go anywhere? Or has she slipped away long ago?

The novel, <a title="Where'd You Go?" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13526165-where-d-you-go-bernadette?ac=1" target="_blank"><em>Where'd You Go Bernadette</em></a> by Maria Semple, opens in Seattle with the main character Bernadette and her family living in a crumbling old house. Her husband works at Microsoft, her daughter goes to a progressive Seattle school and she's becoming a recluse. The story unfolds through a series of emails, letters, faxes (who sends faxes anymore), police and medical reports and prose bits narrated by Bernadette's daughter Bee.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/29050866@N06/12271957553/" title="Where'd You Go by karolinka.sofia, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5526/12271957553_01c6995694_z.jpg" width="640" height="427" alt="Where'd You Go"></a>

Given the fact that I've just moved here I thought the funniest parts of the novel are about Seattle and the kind of people who make this city home. I loved this description of place in the novel. Bernadette is discussing housing and buying a home in Seattle and what this is like as an outsider (she's moving up from LA).
<blockquote>My first trip up here, to Seattle, the realtor picked me up at the airport to look at houses. The morning batch were all Craftsman, which is all they have here, if you don't count the rash of view-busting apartment buildings that appear in inexplicable clump, as if the zoning chief was asleep at his desk during the sixties and seventies and turned architectural design over to the Soviets.

Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It's like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. <em>You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won't matter to you, all that will matter to you is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.</em></blockquote>
I laughed and laughed because frankly, this it true. My Ballard neighborhood is chocked full of Craftsman houses--houses in all sorts of repair and disrepair. But I love it. In my mind, this and the Space Needle are quintessentially Seattle.

But is Seattle really as bad as Bernadette makes it sound when she writes: A gigantic part of me does want my daughter sprung from the dreary provinciality of Seattle.

Oh Seattle, it can't be this bad, can it? Seattle,<em> provincial</em>?

I grew up on the other side of the State in Walla Walla (population 28,000 give or take) so I've always thought of Seattle as a big bustling city and now that I am living here it hasn't failed to meet my expectations and I've living in Washington DC, Sofia, Bulgaria and I've traveled widely in Europe. Is Seattle LA? Nope. But isn't that why people like it here? That's certainly why I like it here.

So should you read this book? Yeah. It's not great literature but the storytelling is clever and both Bernadette and Bee are like-able characters. My big complaint is that the ending is super-sappy.

I got my copy of the book from the <a title="SPL" href="http://www.spl.org/" target="_blank">Seattle Public Library</a> where it turns out they still deal in real-hardcover-books. Sure you could also check out a digital version of the novel from them but then you don't get the pleasure of physically turning the pages!