--- product_id: 770691 title: "Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel" price: "$U1768" currency: UYU in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.uy/products/770691-whered-you-go-bernadette-a-novel store_origin: UY region: Uruguay --- # Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel **Price:** $U1768 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel - **How much does it cost?** $U1768 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.uy](https://www.desertcart.uy/products/770691-whered-you-go-bernadette-a-novel) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description A misanthropic matriarch leaves her eccentric family in crisis when she mysteriously disappears in this "whip-smart and divinely funny" novel that inspired the movie starring Cate Blanchett ( New York Times ). 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 her best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle -- and people in general -- has 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, and secret correspondence -- creating a compulsively readable and surprisingly touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world. Review: A Unique and Wonderful Reading Experience - I loved this book. It engaged me throughout and I hated to put it down. It is a comedy of manners, a parody of political correctness, a satire of the computer world of Microsoft and a laugh-out-loud look at Seattle. It is a wonder of a book and I can't say enough positive things about it. It is about Bernadette Branch, a Macarther Fellow in the past, her husband Elgie, a Microsoft Guru, and their daughter Bee, fifteen going on forty. Bernadette won her award for architecture but now her family lives in a former children's prison that is falling apart. Blackberry brambles are growing through the floor, there are rooms closed off because the floors are all mud and it is a general third world residence. The Branches, by the way, are quite rich so this is a true paradox. At one time Bernadette hoped to fix the place up but her plans never came to fruition. Bee goes to Galer School, a private school, and Bernadette hates the mothers of the children there. She calls them 'gnats'. She and Audrey, the mother of a psychopathic son, are especially at war. When one of Bernadette and Audrey's conflicts ends up in a tragedy worse than they had anticipated, everything escalates. Bee has been getting straight A's and she was told she could have anything she wanted if she finished middle school with perfect grades. She wants a trip to Antarctica and so the family plans this. Additionally, she has been accepted to Choate, an elite boarding school in the northeast. Bernadette had a terrible experience with her architecture in L.A. which caused the family to move to Seattle. Since then she has not done anything professional. She avoids people and, most of the time, lives in her airstream trailer which is on their property. Elgie is hardly ever home. He is a guru at Microsoft and a legend in the computer world, Bernadette is different but is she crazy? Bee doesn't think so. Her mother is her best friend. The gnats hate her and think she has a screw loose. You will have to read this book yourself to decide. It is an amazing feat of writing, composed of narrative, emails, faxes, and documents. All of these are composed in a way that tell the story of what leads to Bernadette's disappearance. This is one of the best books I've read this year and a unique and wonderful reading experience. Do yourself a favor and read this book. Review: Hilarious and Entertaining - At first, i wasn't so sure that I would be able to finish Marie Semple's novel "Where'd You Go, Bernadette". The style of storytelling, through letters/emails/short chapters, was a bit confusing. I felt like the narration was inconsistent. It turns out that the narration was told through the eyes of Bernadette's teenage daughter as she is trying to piece together the mystery of the disappearance of her mother occurring just days prior to a planned family vacation to the arctic. I think what bothered me in the beginning, was although it was supposed to be told through Bee's (the daughters) eyes, Bee seemed to have access to an awful lot of information that she could not possibly know, like emails between the dean at her school and other parents. It seemed implausible. It was eventually explained, but I am not sure that I buy into the explanation. However, within the first fifty pages of the book, I forgave it's short comings. because it was such a fun read. Semple has created vibrate characters and has given them sharp, witty dialogue. She places them in hilarious scenarios and gives them clear motives. The book has so much that is overwhelmingly entertaining, that I can overlook the bits that don't seem to gel. At the heart of the story is the mystery of Bernadette. It's not really so much about her disappearance, but that Bernadette as a person is a mystery. Semple does a great job at dropping little hints about Bernadette all the way through her novel and when I finally had a clear picture of the character it made the whole story come full circle. I love the pacing and the reveal. Semple does a great job at making the places in the story, such as Seattle, their own characters. Seattle, Bee's private prep school and the family home are all as colorful and important as the people in the novel. Places are very specific and important to the core of this story. It's not a story that could happen just anywhere and I love how it's rooted. Although heartwarming and dealing with some very serious issues, Semple's story is ultimately highly entertaining. It's wickedly funny and I laughed out loud many times. Great read. Please check out my blog for more reviews and musings! ## Features - Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel Paperback – April 2, 2013 ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #13,093 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #98 in Humorous Fiction #319 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction #505 in Contemporary Women Fiction | | Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 36,423 Reviews | ## Images ![Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71A2MvwYxWL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Unique and Wonderful Reading Experience *by B***Y on December 7, 2012* I loved this book. It engaged me throughout and I hated to put it down. It is a comedy of manners, a parody of political correctness, a satire of the computer world of Microsoft and a laugh-out-loud look at Seattle. It is a wonder of a book and I can't say enough positive things about it. It is about Bernadette Branch, a Macarther Fellow in the past, her husband Elgie, a Microsoft Guru, and their daughter Bee, fifteen going on forty. Bernadette won her award for architecture but now her family lives in a former children's prison that is falling apart. Blackberry brambles are growing through the floor, there are rooms closed off because the floors are all mud and it is a general third world residence. The Branches, by the way, are quite rich so this is a true paradox. At one time Bernadette hoped to fix the place up but her plans never came to fruition. Bee goes to Galer School, a private school, and Bernadette hates the mothers of the children there. She calls them 'gnats'. She and Audrey, the mother of a psychopathic son, are especially at war. When one of Bernadette and Audrey's conflicts ends up in a tragedy worse than they had anticipated, everything escalates. Bee has been getting straight A's and she was told she could have anything she wanted if she finished middle school with perfect grades. She wants a trip to Antarctica and so the family plans this. Additionally, she has been accepted to Choate, an elite boarding school in the northeast. Bernadette had a terrible experience with her architecture in L.A. which caused the family to move to Seattle. Since then she has not done anything professional. She avoids people and, most of the time, lives in her airstream trailer which is on their property. Elgie is hardly ever home. He is a guru at Microsoft and a legend in the computer world, Bernadette is different but is she crazy? Bee doesn't think so. Her mother is her best friend. The gnats hate her and think she has a screw loose. You will have to read this book yourself to decide. It is an amazing feat of writing, composed of narrative, emails, faxes, and documents. All of these are composed in a way that tell the story of what leads to Bernadette's disappearance. This is one of the best books I've read this year and a unique and wonderful reading experience. Do yourself a favor and read this book. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Hilarious and Entertaining *by K***N on March 21, 2013* At first, i wasn't so sure that I would be able to finish Marie Semple's novel "Where'd You Go, Bernadette". The style of storytelling, through letters/emails/short chapters, was a bit confusing. I felt like the narration was inconsistent. It turns out that the narration was told through the eyes of Bernadette's teenage daughter as she is trying to piece together the mystery of the disappearance of her mother occurring just days prior to a planned family vacation to the arctic. I think what bothered me in the beginning, was although it was supposed to be told through Bee's (the daughters) eyes, Bee seemed to have access to an awful lot of information that she could not possibly know, like emails between the dean at her school and other parents. It seemed implausible. It was eventually explained, but I am not sure that I buy into the explanation. However, within the first fifty pages of the book, I forgave it's short comings. because it was such a fun read. Semple has created vibrate characters and has given them sharp, witty dialogue. She places them in hilarious scenarios and gives them clear motives. The book has so much that is overwhelmingly entertaining, that I can overlook the bits that don't seem to gel. At the heart of the story is the mystery of Bernadette. It's not really so much about her disappearance, but that Bernadette as a person is a mystery. Semple does a great job at dropping little hints about Bernadette all the way through her novel and when I finally had a clear picture of the character it made the whole story come full circle. I love the pacing and the reveal. Semple does a great job at making the places in the story, such as Seattle, their own characters. Seattle, Bee's private prep school and the family home are all as colorful and important as the people in the novel. Places are very specific and important to the core of this story. It's not a story that could happen just anywhere and I love how it's rooted. Although heartwarming and dealing with some very serious issues, Semple's story is ultimately highly entertaining. It's wickedly funny and I laughed out loud many times. Great read. Please check out my blog for more reviews and musings! ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Brilliant Anti-PC Commentary, Moving Psychological Portrait In Audaciously Witty Wrapper *by P***M on October 17, 2012* "Where'd You Go Bernadette" is a very stealthy book of ideas and insights, wrapped in a delectable froth of humor, nonsense, mystery and suspense. Tucked into that enviable combination is a moving story of unconditional love between parent and child, and a surprisingly sure and intimate portrait of what it looks and feels like when someone loses touch with their central identity. All in a book that you could cheerfuly knock back as easy beach reading. A truly terrific book. So many others here have already described the plot better than a back cover summary could do, so I won't duplicate their efforts but will just skip to my reactions to the writing and the story. It took me a while to decide whether Bernadette Fox was a contemptible, self-absorbed elitist with epic anger management issues, or my new hero. By the end of the book (okay, midway) I'd concluded she's probably not quite either, but I was leaning very heavily toward the latter. I started out feeling a teensy bit defensive and offended, and trying to figure whether I was supposed to be a good guy or a bad guy in Bernadette's world. Then I decided I didn't care, and enjoyed the ride. As a parent who once very deliberately chose a "Subaru school" over a "Mercedes school" (as the socially insecure fundraisers for Bernadette's daughter, Bee's, private school characterize them ), I found myself alternately bristling at and howling with empathic glee over Semple and Bernadette's scorn for the ideas of community, and the more mindless examples of PCism and the more judgmental forms of ersatz earth-motherhood. Even in the clutches of what turns out to have been a long, slow free-fall of existential crisis, depression, anxiety, neuroses and agoraphobia, reclusive Bernadette is smarter, braver, more creative, more honest, more demanding of integrity, more nurturing, funnier and MUCH more fun than any of the other moms at school. She also has a distinctly individualistic and social Darwinist world view that is not always compassionate (a term Bernadette scorns, apparently confusing it with weakness, fuzzy-headednes or pandering) or altogether likeable (especially in her crazier, more bitterly misanthropic moments, even if these are very funny), but for the most part it's highly principled and very frequently right on. Agree or disagree with Bernadette, love her or loathe her, if she doesnt make you stop and think, you've missed something. Sample's and Bernadette's championship of traditional education, hard and fast objective standards, self-reliance, individual creativity and the radical idea that it is legitimate to treat extraordinarily talented contributors to society (or a company) as superior to those of mediocre ability will ring a bell with those who have read Aym Rand's "The Fountainhead," and presumably it's no coincidence that Bernadette is an iconoclastic architect. Fortunately for all of us, Bernadette is more three-dimensionally human, more vulnerable, mouthier and infinitely more fun than Howard Roarke. Unfortunately for her, she's even less suited to live in a world that contains other people than Roarke is. When Bernadette's overly withdrawn and idiosyncratic world collides disasterously with the busy-body, run of the mill, overly interventionist world around her, something has to go -- and it turns out to be Bernadette. This epistolary style book is a crazy, outsized, hilarious romp composed of emails between snooty and self-deluded mothers at the private school, said mothers and "blackberry abatement specialists," Bernadette and the India-based e-personal assistant that she has hired for 75 cents per hour to make her dentist appointments, old newspaper stories, excerpts from a TEDTalk by Bernadette's software rockstar husband, police reports, ship's logs, school news bulletins, parent communications from a PTSD specialist, FBI profiles, hospital bills, apocalyptic weather reports; you name it, all tied together with interpolations by Bernadette's very poised 14 year old daughter, Bee. Bee is probably the only reliable narrator in the book, and she's a lovely creation: smart, motivated, aware, with a highly developed BS meter, but warm, enthusiastic, full of goofy inside jokes, and open to wonder, surprise and pain despite her maturity. Bee is at once a matter of fact, irreverent and deeply sympathetic guide through the events that lead to her mother's disappearance. Ultimately it is the laser -like focus of mother and daughter on each other that propels the story, and gives coherence to Bernadette's seemingly fractured character. Even when you don't know whether or not you should be pulling for Bernadette, you know you are pulling for Bee -- which is perhaps what makes this otherwise philosophically complex book an easy, straight- forward read that you won't want to put down. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.uy/products/770691-whered-you-go-bernadette-a-novel](https://www.desertcart.uy/products/770691-whered-you-go-bernadette-a-novel) --- *Product available on Desertcart Uruguay* *Store origin: UY* *Last updated: 2026-05-27*