"Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattleùand people in generalùhas made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondenceùcreating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.Y26" - (EBSCOhost)

Bernadette is a frightfully intelligent wife and mother whose intense allergy to Seattle specifically, and to people in general, has driven her to hire a virtual assistant in India to execute even her most basic tasks. Then her daughter, Bee, insists on a family trip to Antarctica as her reward for getting perfect grades in middle school, and Bernadette is faced with the daunting prospect of actual human interaction. The timing could not be worse. Worn down by years of dealing with Seattle’s polite drivers, overzealous moms, and proximity to Idaho (and don’t even get her started on Canada), Bernadette is already on the brink of a breakdown.

Throw in a feud with her neighbor over Bernadette’s rampant blackberry bushes, the scandal that erupts when she runs over another mother’s foot at the school’s drop-off, and a class fundraiser that goes disastrously awry-and it is all too much. Bernadette vanishes, leaving her Microsoft-guru husband, a horde of angry parents, and questioning police officers to pick up the pieces. Desperate to find her mother, Bee probes her emails, invoices, school memos, private correspondence, and other evidence, conjuring out of those shards a portrait of a woman she never knew before-and a secret that could explain everything.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are. It is also a riotous satire of privilege and an unsentimental but powerful story of a daughter’s unflinching love for her imperfect mother.

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* Bernadette Fox is on the edge of a breakdown. She hates living in Seattle and calls the moms at her daughter's private school "gnats." But Bernadette adores her precocious daughter, Bee, and is looking forward to a family trip to Antarctica. Yet after a disastrous school fund-raiser and a botched psychiatric intervention, Bernadette disappears. Convinced her mother is alive, Bee is determined to find her mom and bring her home. Reader Wilhoite mines the humor and pathos in this quirky story, told through e-mails, letters, school memos, documents, and first-person narrative. Wilhoite handles the changing formats with aplomb, and through changes in pitch, tone, and cadence, she easily transitions between the many oddball characters. She contrasts the escalating anxiety in Bernadette's e-mails with the calm responses from Bernadette's virtual assistant in India, whose businesslike and unflappable messages are spoken in a mild Indian accent. E-mail exchanges between two mothers (gnats) are a hoot, from early missives, when they mock Bernadette, to later notes, when their own lives are disintegrating. Wilhoite is equally at home speaking in a lower register for memos from a harried and increasingly upset school administrator. She pitches her voice a tad higher to capture Bee's youth and energy, allowing listeners to care about the teenager who has been through so much and just wants to find the mother she loves. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.