Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

*This review contains spoilers* This book started out really well. I'm a big fan of satire and I found myself settling in for an enjoyable read (I LOVE Arrested Development which Maria Semple worked on, so my expectations were high). At about 40% the shine started to come off. It was the magazine article on Bernadette and her "brilliance" that did it. The woman designed ONE eco house in her entire life and yet she is lauded twenty years later as some kind of genius. Maybe this is meant to be part of the joke but it wasn't funny, especially considering that Bernadette's repressed creativity is seen to be the root cause of all her problems at the end. There needed to be some anchoring in reality. It was also at this point that I realized much of the book is written in the same voice. The simplistically written article, letters, reports etc all sound like they've been penned by the same person. At times they're also boring and I skimmed a lot. The emails are better but Bernadette, Audrey and Soo-Lin are all remarkably similar in their whiney, self-pitying, self-absorbed, judgemental snarkiness. None of these characters are likeable but Bernadette is by far the worst and she's the one the reader is supposed to sympathize with! I did not like this character at all, and I found myself feeling very confused about exactly who is the target of satire in this book. I came to the conclusion the reader is supposed to vicariously enjoy and share in Bernadette's rants and her insufferable snobbishness. The way the family's wealth is constantly highlighted through Bernadette's spending doesn't seem to be for satirical reasons, but rather to reinforce Bernadette's superiority to Audrey and Soo-Lin who do have to worry about money. My interpretation is supported by the fact that Bernadette is basically exonerated at the end. Her only real crime was being too trusting of her Indian virtual assistant, while Audrey and Elgie are to blame for everything else. Bernadette gets the happy ending while Soo-Lin is left carrying Elgie's baby and a contrite Audrey is exiled somewhere in the desert while her son goes through detox. Maybe Soo-Lin's pregnancy is meant to cast doubt on the implied happy ending, but I'm more inclined to believe that Bernadette and Elgie will pay Soo-Lin off and swat the baby out of their lives like another annoying gnat. I can't help but feel there's something quite nasty lurking beneath this "satire" about a privileged white woman denied an outlet (of her own making) for her creative genius. All foreigners are portrayed in a satirical way, but to what purpose? Satire has traditionally been used to lampoon the powerful, but the author seems to want to play it both ways here and it doesn't work. I think Bee is meant to be a sympathetic character but even she comes across as an entitled little princess with her cracks about Yoko Ono and big, black women wearing dresses from Macys (god forbid!). As for the plot, well it also spiralled downwards at about the halfway mark. Even in a comedy there needs to be some level of plausibility, but we are supposed to believe that Bernadette can leave a cruise ship and sneak onto an island populated by scientists, who then offer her a job, and no one thinks to inform the cruise ship that she's with them? Didn't it ever occur to these people that a missing person on a cruise ship is quite a big deal? On top of everything else the tone and pace of the book are very uneven. I can handle absurdist, over-the-top events when they're actually funny, but these weren't and the superficial characterisation didn't help me to relate to the storyline. Pop culture references, contemporary observations, and insider jokes about Seattle and Microsoft do not make a great book by themselves. I was left scratching my head over the popularity of this one.