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Mirkat

Mirkat Always Reading

I'm always reading something, usually multiple books at a time.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (Audio) - Maria Semple Bernadette Fox is a brilliant architect and semi-recluse who employs a virtual assistant called Manjula to handle most of her routine affairs and minimize how much she needs to interact with her fellow humans in Seattle. Bernadette's husband, Elgin Branch, is a renowned programmer at Microsoft known for having the fourth most popular TED talk. Bernadette has managed to make herself unpopular with fellow Galer Street School moms, mainly because she avoids joining parent committees, thereby showing she doesn't value "community." Bernadette and Elgin's daughter Bee, an eighth grader with exemplary report cards, intends to hold her parents to a promise they'd made of an anything-she-wants graduation present if she maintained perfect report cards her whole way through. And what she wants is a family trip to Antarctica. Which causes Bernadette to quietly freak out.... Bernadette goes missing, and Bee is determined to find her. Various types of correspondence--emails, faxes, letters, invoices, and the like--interspersed with Bee's narration help piece together the story of what has happened. Can Bernadette be found? This book is delightful. That's the word that kept coming into my head. I just love smart, quirky characters. And Kathleen Wilhoite's narration was perfect. Wilhoite is an actress (you might remember her from Gilmore Girls) and singer (she nails "Holy Night" in one scene in the book), and I was surprised to learn this was her first time narrating an audiobook. It seems she befriended Maria Semple in a writing group. I hope she decides to narrate her own books and others, too.