Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

I am always excited about finding an honest-to-goodness, laugh-out-loud funny book now and then. Maria Semple has written for television – arrested development, Mad About You, and Ellen. She lives in Seattle where fictional Bernadette stages her “disappearance from the stresses of her life”. Bernadette is mother to precocious Bee, wife of Elgie the Microsoft guru of robotics and a MacArthur grant recipient in her own right for her architectural masterpiece – The Twenty Mile House – a pioneer in green building. But everything she would seek to build crumbles and when frustrations mount – she stages a vanishing act so funny it had me reading pages out loud. Don’t miss the transcript of Elgie’s fictional TED talk! I had seen this book advertised in several women’s magazines and couldn’t wait to get it from the library. I won’t say where I read it – but a picture is worth 1,000 words.