Finished 11-21-12, rating 3.75/5, romantic suspense, pub. 2011

Julie DeMarco loved her big Italian-American family and they loved her, even though her blonde hair and blue eyes made her an obvious outsider.  Her mother married into the family and then had another daughter.  Julie never knew anything else.  Then one day at a photography exhibit she sees a photo of a little girl standing at the gate of a Russian orphanage.  She is scared when she feels a connection and wonders if the girl could be her.

Julie has had a rough year.  Her mother died, taking answers about her birth with her, her ‘father’ is drinking himself to death and her fiance is pushing for a wedding date.  Julie tells her fiance she’s not putting him off, but it’s not hard to see that she is and he is not supportive of her wild goose chase.  Neither is her sister, which I never did understand.  But Julie plunges ahead in her search with the help of sexy, bad boy photographer, Alex.

I found this book to be highly enjoyable and hard to put down.  There were a few twists I didn’t see coming and some danger that kept the suspense alive.  Oh, and the sex helped move the story along too.  While I found some of the storylines somewhat simplistic and the end just a bit too neat, I also found the book highly addictive.  A fast read that will keep you guessing.

I bought this for my Nook.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, rating 2.75/5, fiction, 336 pages, pub, 2012

I accepted this for review because I enjoyed Semple’s first book and she was gracious enough to let me ask her a few questions a few years ago here on the blog.  I read nothing but positive things about it from other bloggers and it’s even up for a best book award at Goodreads.  So, it was bound to be a disappointment, right? Unfortunately, it was.

Bernadette, a reknowned architect, has been stuck in suburban Seattle hell for almost 20 years and her husband mentally checked out of her wacky ways way back as he focused on his very important job at Microsoft.  Bee, their daughter, never felt neglected or unloved so the parents were successful in raising a daughter with a bright future.  The story focuses on where Bernadette had disappeared to, but this doesn’t really happen until the last third of the book.

It was an epistolary novel, mostly.  There were chunks thrown in from Bee, especially at the end, that broke up that narrative in a less than positive way.  I liked the emails, police reports, newspaper articles, FBI reports, text messages that made up the story of Bernadette’s disappearance, but until the very last few pages I never cared about Bernadette or her husband Elgin. At the very end I appreciated Bernadette’s journey, but getting there was a journey I wouldn’t take again. Bee, was a sympathetic character but not one I connected with.

There were exotic locales, Antarctica playing a big role in most of the book, and plenty of laughable/hateful characters depicting the wealthy suburbanites I am all too familiar with so I think this could be a great movie.  The characters often felt like caricatures that could definitely work on the big screen, but for me I found them a bit too whiny on the page.

I was hoping to be entertained, but I grew bored early on and didn’t care at all until the crazy end.  What happened to Bernadette?  It’s a doozy.  I know I’m in the minority for not really liking this one and I’m okay with that.

I want to thank Anna at Little Brown for sending me a copy of the book 🙂