Staff Recommendation: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Archives staff member, Robin Melland, recommends listening to the audiobook version of Maria Semple’s novel. “It is a silly and fun book where crazy, weird things keep happening – pure entertainment.”    

Student worker, Colleen Roach, recommends reading the hardcover edition from the fourth floor browsing collection. “This book has just enough drama and mystery in it to keep you hooked but not so much that you get sick of the story and characters. It is interesting to see the path that Bernadette's life takes in response to her successes and failures and how that path affects those around her. 

It was an easy book to stay interested in because of the slight twists that happen throughout the story.”  

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

By Maria Semple

New York: Hachette Audio, 2013 (9 CDs) or

New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012

Available in the library on 4^th floor.

Call number:

 PS3619.E495 W54 2013 (Audiobooks) 

 PS3619.E495 W54 2012 (Browsing books)

Janet Maslin from The New York Times writes “The tightly constructed “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is written in many formats — e-mails, letters, F.B.I. documents, correspondence with a psychiatrist and even an emergency-room bill for a run-in between Bernadette and Audrey. Yet these pieces are strung together so wittily that Ms. Semple’s storytelling is always front and center, in sharp focus. You could stop and pay attention to how apt each new format is, how rarely she repeats herself and how imaginatively she unveils every bit of information. But you would have to stop laughing first.

Everyone in this sparkling novel is wily, smart or even smarter. The brainiest character is arguably Elgin, who works at Microsoft and leads the design team for what, the book says, is Bill Gates’s favorite project. Elgin is famed for not wearing shoes, for giving the fourth-most-watched TED talk and for generally being Microsoft’s version of a rock star.” Full Review