A good friend introduced me to Where’d You Go, Bernadette.  I bought the book and I couldn’t put it down.  There’s just something about Semple’s characters that pulls me in and I become invested in their lives.  They feel like real people.  They have all kinds of struggles: depression, anxiety, peer pressure, family pressure.  Not to mention they usually find themselves in rather interesting situations.  Not unbelievable situations, just interesting ones.

After loving Where’d You go, Bernadette, I kept an eye out for anything new by Maria Semple.  As soon as the audiobook became available at my library, I checked out Today Will be Different.  It did not disappoint.  It kept me listening.  I had to know what was going to happen at the end.

I like real characters.  I like characters who deal with realistic issues.  I especially like characters who handle those issues and learn and grow.  There are some characters out there who just keep making the same mistakes and just can’t manage to learn anything.  I know that is realistic.  But it makes me want to yell at the characters,  “Why are you doing that? It didn’t work 50 pages ago!”  Not that yelling at the characters works, but it can make me feel better.

So read her books.  The mental health aspects (anxiety, depression) of the books are well done.  It’s not preachy and there are no magic solutions.  So very realistic and very compassionate.  You’ll love Bernadette and Eleanor and the kids, the husbands, too.  You’ll probably be able to relate to them, too.

A compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle – and people in general – has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence – creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Eleanor knows she’s a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won’t swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother’s company. It’s also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office-but not Eleanor-that he’s on vacation. Just when it seems like things can’t go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living.