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Former TV writer satirizes Seattle

By Connie Ogle / The Miami Herald

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette" By Maria Semple (Little, Brown, 336 pgs., $25.99)

If Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl" represented the dark heart of the summer literature, Maria Semple’s breezy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette" embodies the sunnier, funnier side.

A satiric take on all things Seattle — Microsoft, ambitious private-school parents, crunchy-granola types, politically correct self-helpers who join groups like Victims Against Victimhood, wild blackberries that ravage the hillsides untamed, the rain, oh God, the rain — the novel is scathing and funny, yet has a surprising generosity toward family dynamics, forgiveness and the burden of genius. It is an absolute delight.

A patchwork epistolary novel that includes emails and official documents, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette" is the narrative of one Bee “Balakrishna" Fox (that “Balakrishna" was a mistake, for the record). Bee is an eighth-grader who lives with her Microsoft superhero dad and her increasingly manic mom, Bernadette, a formerly famous architect.

A planned family trip to Antarctica sets off a series of increasingly insane events that prompt Bernadette to vanish, and Bee is determined to find her mother — even if she has to travel to the edge of the known universe to do it.

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