So many other Cannonballers have read this one, there isn’t much left for me to say. So I’ll keep it brief.
Bee’s mom, Bernadette, disappears under mysterious circumstances. She’s suffered for years in a city that she doesn’t love, surrounded by people that she thought she hated. She left a failed career behind her in Los Angeles and now lets her husband — a big player at Microsoft — be the star of the family.
The story is told through letters, emails, transcribed TED talks, magazine articles, interviews, and other correspondence — some directly from Bernadette, and some just about her. And young genius Bee uses this paper trail to try and find out what happened to her mother and where she could be now.
While I didn’t love the ending (really, the whole Antarctica storyline was a bit much for me), I did love pretty much every other thing about this book. I loved the hilariously nasty emails that went back and forth between the other moms at Bee’s school (this is why I don’t get too involved with the PTA at our local elementary school!), and also enjoyed the increasingly crazed emails sent from Bernadette to her “virtual assistant” in India.
Completely original and entertaining. Glad I finally got around to it. Thanks Cannonball friends!!
You can read more of my review on my blog.
Cannonball Read V 
When the Antarctica thing happened, I just kind of went HUH and then the craziness propelled me to extreme amounts of love. I can totally see how that stuff might have been taken differently, though. Definitely a weird little gamble.