Maria Semple's novel on living in Seattle has been dubbed this summer's "most absorbing" novel.
Where'd You Go Benadette's heroine is Bernadette Fox
[...] A former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.
Bernadette is a misanthrope and views Seattle through a misanthropic lens:
[...] where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman, [...] It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance.
As far as I know, Seattle has been home to a vast array of novels, none of which hold Seattle in bright light.
I had in mind Jonathan Raban's Waxwings, that showed Seattlelites as ruthless and mindless wealth-accumulators during the dot com boom era.
A large number of zombie and vampire novels, including one of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, have Seattle as background.
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