When Bee gets a perfect report card, she reminds her parents that they promised her anything she wanted: and what she wants is a family trip to Antarctica. Thus begins this quirky novel about precocious Bee, her Microsoft-engineer and TED-star father, and her eccentric, misanthropic mother Bernadette. Bernadette was once a promising architect, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, but has become a recluse in Seattle, a city she hates, depending on a virtual assistant in India to do even the most mundane tasks for her.

Bernadette's strange story is told in emails, a TED talk transcript, a magazine article, instant messages, etc., with some narration from Bee thrown in throughout. Towards the end of the book, though, it switches suddenly to being narrated entirely by Bee, and as a result this section felt very disconnected from the rest of the story. I liked the concept of the story being told in different ways by a number of different people -- except that, to my mind, the voices of the characters weren't really differentiated from each other. The emails and articles all sounded like they were written by the same person, and the emails, in particular, didn't read at all like how people actually write (unless these busybody Seattle mothers were all closet novelists). For some reason, I just wasn't able to let my "suspension of disbelief" module kick in when it came to those emails.

This book has so many glowing reviews, I feel like I must be missing something...but it just didn't do it for me, really, which is too bad because I'd been looking forward to it so much! I didn't dislike it, certainly, but for me it just missed the mark. Still, though, it's a quick, enjoyable, funny read.

Advance copy received from the publisher at Book Expo America. Publication date August 14, 2012