I got Where’d You Go, Bernadette? in my office’s Secret Santa, from a colleague who knows I like to read. The jacket copy made it sound like generic Busy Wife And Mother fiction, so I had a secret laugh at being perceived as someone who should get a women’s fiction bestseller. I mean, I do like bestsellers, and all the family sagas I LOVE are women’s lit, but I usually feel like an awkward disaster disguised as a responsible adult, especially at work, so being seen as mainstream lady type felt like I’d successfully pulled off my trick.

Well, kinda. This is the story of a woman who ditches her family to hide in Antarctica, a book I started on my flight and then finished in my beachside hut on my solo trip to Hawaii.

This novel starts out being about a Quirky Mom in homogeneous suburbia hellscape, but Bernadette quickly veers from a woman who could not be less interested in school fundraisers or cooking dinners, to a woman whose entire house is falling apart, literally and figuratively. Bernadette goes to the edge of the world, literally and figuratively.

I don’t usually love epistolary novels, because they tend to blend what I dislike in rotating-character POV novels (Are you listening, YA authors? Please stop.) plus what I dislike in unreliable narrators, wrapped up in a gimmicky little box. So I found myself skimming some of the emails, but at least later on Bernadette’s extreme confessions to her assistant and some of the wildest PTA rumors come back in a cleverly over-the-top way, as this totally unpredictable plot comes to a resolution.