Where'd you go Bernadette

By Maria Semple

This book was hilarious and entertaining.  It is set in Seattle and features a female architect   who is suffering depression and possibly agoraphobia.  She is using an Internet Online Assistant to conduct all her basic activities including ordering food. They live in a house that is being consumed by blackberry bushes and rot.
The woman rants about Seattle, people in Seattle, Microsoft, where her husband works; parents of children at her child's school (who hate her) and Canadians.

The woman's daughter is a star pupil at a yuppie school and calls in her parents promise to take her to Antarctica if she gets good grade.  This of course presents a problem for the mother who is terrified of having to be in close proximity to people on a ship and the dangerous ocean they will be travelling through.
She pretends to go along with the trip but really plans to get out of going.

In the meantime she is having a fued with a neighbour, whose son attends her daughter's school  The woman insists she remove the blackberry bushes as they are affecting her yard, when the Architects hires the man the woman recommends disaster occurs. While she is having a party for parents of prospective students for the school, in the hope of raising money for the school, the hill on which the Architect's house sits collapses in a big rainstorm and falls into the neighbours house, almost destroying the house.  Needless to say the neighbour goes ballistic.

While all this is happening the architect's husband is being wooed by his Admin Assistant who also has her children at the same school and who is also conspiring against the architect along with the architect's woman.  The neighbour ends up having a breakdown and finding out her son is a drug addict.

After the husband hears about the property damage and that the "assistant" his wife was using is acutally someone from the Russian mafia who want to steal their identity and money, he tries to get his wife institutionalized to get help.  The architect's neighbour has a change of heart and helps the architect escape.
They later learn that his wife went on the antarctic trip but that she disappeared from the ship. The admin wastes no time making a move on the husband and becomes pregnant.  The husband says he will look after her but refuses to move in with her.

The daughter receives a package outlining notes and emails sent by the neighbour woman , it includes notes and emails sent by the neighbour, the father, her mother, and a psychiatrist.  It helps the daughter piece together what had happened to her mother and why.  She tells her Dad that they should go on the Antarctica trip for "closure".  But she really wanting to go to find her mother whom she is sure is there somewhere.  She is right, the mother had sneaked off the ship and is working in Antarctica.  She hopes to get a job designing a new building in the Antarctic.  The family is reunited. It looks like the future for them will be good, not sure and don't care what happens to the admin.

This was a funny book, the author did a great job of  presenting a really kooky story and portraying the snobbery and obsessiveness of the social climbers/yupppie parents. It was nice that things seemed to work out for the best in the end.