Title: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Author: Maria Semple
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Contemporary, Humour, Mental health
Pace: Fast
Format: Novel
Year: 2012

I know that this book has a lot of strong recommendations and reviews. But I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from it. Probably because I don’t often love the books that get such rave reviews. Sometimes I think that people give said reviews because they feel that they SHOULD, not because it was actually enjoyable.

Having said that. I will most definitely rave about this book. It was nothing that I expected and it drew me in from the very first moment. After all, there is a mystery to solve from the very beginning. Combine that with the ways in which Bee is able to structure and tell the story, the larger than life characters… I was completely enmeshed.

I love that this is a story about the love between a mother and daughter. It’s a reminder that real love doesn’t come with conditions, but is about accepting and loving someone for exactly who they are. Or at least, that’s how I took this story. That Bee is able to find out more and more about her mother’s flaws. But still love her.

Underlying all of this is the question of mental health. What makes someone sane? What makes them “normal”? And where is the damn line between the two? I still have no answers, and it seems that Semple doesn’t either. A perfect approach as far as I’m concerned.

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Image source: Goodreads