Bern Blog

My latest novel, Midwest Farmers' Daughters is now available on Amazon. Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Y4HC8P8/

Hope you enjoy!!!

Here's the links to my reviews of A Man Walks into a Hardware Store

• https://amzn.to/38RzAsP
• https://bit.ly/2EqohK7

My Casting Credits

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0212480/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1

Looping Website

http://www.proadrlooping.com/

Kirkus Review of my latest novel, Midwest Farmers' Daughters   

TITLE INFORMATION 

MIDWEST FARMERS' DAUGHTERS 

Bernie Van De Yacht Manuscript (325 pp.) 

BOOK REVIEW 

A literary novel follows three high school friends through the trials of middle age. 

They grew up together, three best friends in a small Wisconsin community where nearly everyone’s father was a farmer. Val was the smart, nonconforming one who dreamed of getting out of town and becoming a city slicker. Crystal was the pretty and popular one. Penny was the self-described middle one, always a little jealous of how easily things came to her two friends. Now, on the cusp of age 50, the three remain close. A few years ago, Val moved back to town, the successful founder (with her much younger husband) of a fitness center geared toward women. Crystal has five sons with her high school sweetheart—and a waistline that has ballooned to the point of obesity. Penny has one child, her miracle daughter, Rose, but ever since the girl turned 18, the relationship has been inexplicably strained. Some things have changed over the intervening decades, but some things have not. The three women still compare their lives, leaning on one another for support while judging their friends’ actions. At the center of the friendship is Penny’s secret trauma regarding something that happened back on prom night—something that she blames, in part, on Crystal and Val. Van De Yacht manages to capture the personalities and rhythms of his three narrators, particularly their colorful Wisconsinite speech. In a flashback, Crystal notes: “Bart is the quarterback of the football team and I’m head cheerleader, for crumpsakes. Only reason Penny is on court is ’cause I told Bart’s best friend to ask her. I thought that was pretty darn nice of me, ’n so?” Each of the three protagonists is deftly constructed—flawed yet sympathetic—and they prove to be compelling appraisers of one another’s foibles. Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is an incisive triple portrait of the way small choices shape the courses of people’s lives—and the way cohorts who start out in roughly the same place can end up in vastly different ones. 

A rich exploration of friendship and heartache in the Midwest.