Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was a, light, enjoyable, and easy read about a woman who disappears from her home days before a planned family trip to Antarctica in the midst of what appears to be a mental health crisis. Bernadette faced a crushing blow to her work as an architect, so when her husband gets a job at Microsoft in Seattle, they decide to move there. She is pretty much a homebody, which leads to the narrative that she is reclusive and antisocial by the parents at her daughter’s school, and that combined with her husband’s wish to have her committed (wtf) makes for a scary situation, which is why she simply disappears. While her husband is ready to move on and accept that is dead or simply gone, her daughter is not, and travels to Antarctica to try to find her. Weaving together research from the worlds of architecture, Microsoft, and Antarctica, probably took a lot of work, and though I know next to nothing about architecture or Microsoft, I can say that for the most part there were no mistakes in her writing about Antarctica, only two small mistakes that I noticed (that Antarctica does indeed have a flag, and that Emperor penguins can only be seen during October, because during the rest of the year they inhabit parts of the continent too far away for people to get to), which is hardly anything to complain about.
Madame Sousatzka, Bernice Rubens
This book has been on my TBR list for literal ages—I first bought it when I visited a friend in Wales and wanted to buy some Welsh women authors. It is about a piano teacher from Germany living in London in a dilapidated house with three renters and their unique personalities, each of whom is living their life outside of the bounds of “normal” society. One is a sex worker living in the attic, the other an unmarried physical therapist, and the last a woman who doesn’t leave her basement apartment and longs for her husband who died many years ago. Sousatzka becomes obsessed with one of her students who she feels is a prodigy, and her every action revolves around not losing him as a student, which, as one can imagine, leads to him leaving her for another teacher. Rubens’ elaborate descriptions of each character, as well as the house itself, makes each of them into a character study and allows the reader to immerse themselves in the world she has created. I have another novel by Rubens sitting on my shelf; hopefully it won’t take me another decade to get around to it!