New Releases by Maria Semple

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 a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It 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, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

An Amazon Best Book of October 2016: Maria Semple returns to the Seattle of her debut novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, this time with the protagonist Eleanor Flood, a status-conscious transplant who vows on page one that Today will be different. Spoiler alert: not really... at least not in the way that she thinks. Semple's greatest asset as a writer is her charm, and her many fans—myself included—would gladly follow her wherever she will lead us. Semple's spot-on eye for the telling, quirky detail and her sense of humor are enough to carry a novel, but in Today Will Be Different she introduces a few weightier strands to the story that could signal more depth to come in future novels. It's fun to read Maria Semple's books, and it's fun to imagine where she'll take us next. --Chris Schluep, The Amazon Book Review