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You can see why people think Bernadette Fox is “eccentric.” The star of Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Arrested Development writer Maria Semple doesn’t quite fit in with the other Seattle stay at home moms. She adores her 8th grade daughter Bee, but can’t help rolling her eyes at a private school curriculum that includes “Expressive Movement.” She refers to the school’s overly-involved parents as “gnats” and has her errands managed by a virtual personal assistant from India. It’s Bee who pieces together the events leading up to her mom’s pre-Christmas disappearance through emails, letters, and her own recollections. What could drive a doting, well-to-do mother out of her family’s manse? The answer is a smart, satiric romp that gallops right up to the edge of absurd and then turns around and kindly chastens you for having assumed the worst. Readers who made the most of their three-day weekend with this witty page-turner may also enjoy:

• All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown
• Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman
• It’s My F***ing Birthday by Merrill Markoe
• The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
• The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
• Straight Man by Richard Russo
• This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 at 8:00 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.