A sleeper summer hit, Maria Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Little, Brown, $25.99), is a quirky sendup of crunchy, Microsoft-centric Seattle culture. This pastiche of an epistolary novel weaves the likes of school report cards, emergency room bills, and police reports to tell the story of a once-famous MacArthur genius award-winning architect unraveling in relative obscurity at midlife. Told largely from the point of view of Bee, an eighth-grader coming to grips with the possible dissolution of her family when her mother goes missing, the story is as tender as it is hilarious, a feat that perhaps only a former staff writer of the deliciously twisted television series Arrested Development could successfully pull off.