Bee Season by myla goldberg

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

2.5 stars What in the world did I just read? This is a sweet story about a little girl and a spelling bee but it’s all wrapped up in dysfunction. Her parents? What are you even doing? Her brother? Buddy, what’s going on? Clearly there’s some mental illness going on here so I don’t want to seem like a monster but these people are a fat mess. Proceed with caution. Lol.

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almost3am

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Bee Season exists at the baffling intersection of Spelling Bees, Jewish mysticism, Hare Krishna recruitment, and mental illness. Each family member has a sort of unconventional relationship with the others, although it's difficult to see how very strange things are until they start to fall apart. (Oh, Chinua Achebe, you go everywhere with me).

The very average, younger sister becomes the favored child when Eliza suddenly displays her surprising aptitude for turning words into carefully placed letters recited aloud. This provides an opportunity for the fissures of the family to become giant gullies straight through the middle of a very normal family. Her older brother starts spending time with people who shave their heads, smell like incense, wear orange robes, and talk about the illusions of the material world. Her mother drifts further and further away from reality. Her father misses the whole unraveling, caught up in his enthusiasm for Eliza's potential & the going-on's of Transcendence.

I was captivated by the fumbling, ineffective parenting. I mean, no one really "knows" how to "be a good parent," but it is always remarkable how best intentions can go so awry. When your kid joins a cult, is it your shortcoming as a parent? I also loved the very honest way that Goldberg explored the ways that Saul transfers his own dreams/goals onto a kid's life experience. Aaron & Eliza resolve that pressure in very different ways. This provides insight into their convictions & spirit.

In the post-book interview, Goldberg says that she only knew Eliza's character and the final scene of the book, and that the rest of the story unfolded itself to her as she wrote it. Dang! What a ride through the fiction lurking in the back of Myla's brain.

I read this on the suggestion of Ariel Federow. She said, "I liked it a lot. I don't want to blow the ending." As a person who *loved* A Prayer for Owen Meany in high school, this sort of review with a mysterious, spoil-able ending really intrigues me. I not only requested it from the library, but bumped it to the top of my "to read" queue, getting it on audiobook because that is the fastest way for me to get through a book. I commute, okay? Anyway, I was glad I did because this book is the JAM.

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KevinLDD

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The one character in the book who takes LSD is the one who DOESN'T go insane. I just wanted to start with that though it's not really accurate or relevant. Eliza doesn't go insane. She has an experience that some might call insane since it's extreme and out of the ordinary. I like to think it was a true mystical experience and that having tasted the ultimate, she decides to say "No thank you." Or maybe what she says is "That will surfice." This is a family of seekers--both of God and of emotional fulfillment--all the while trying to live normally and failing at it.

Miriam creates a great work of art which will be destroyed for use as evidence. I don't imagine her treatment in a mental hospital will result in anything good for either her or her family. Aaron seems to be getting something out of his kirtan but who knows if it will continue. My experience with Krishna folk is that they're mostly young so either one outgrows it or something else happens to separate you from it.

Saul is a failed mystic who hopes to get another chance vicariously through his daughter. She wants to be close to him and so goes along with the plan but in the end seems to learn that's not the kind of relationship with her dad that she wants. I wonder, though, if he's capable of any other kind. He may be, but we never find out. Maybe Eliza, with her transcendent knowledge, can work it out with him.

But we don't really know what happens to any of the characters. The book ends with a punchline. A good punchline, perhaps, but life is not a joke.

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Fyzle

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

What a fascinating book! a friend bought it because she is interested in bees, the buzzing kind and found out soon enough that the bees in question were all to do with American spelling quizzes. horrendous idea, but the perfect vehicle for showing us contemporary family life at its worst and eventually at its most redemptive. I was just getting a bit peeved with the mother when it runed out she had a fascinating secret - and I was hooked.
Beautifully written, the descriptions of her secret are breathtaking. The poor girl who has to redeem herself through her spelling never quite seems real - her brother's angst about religion and growing up are however perfectly delineated.
Very highly recommended.

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ar1s3

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This book was masterfully written and extremely surprising. I picked it up off my roommate's shelf thinking, "Oh, this looks like a sweet little book about spelling bees." I don't even know where to begin in describing how wrong I was. That was one thing that made the book so stunning: it completely circumvented my expectations.

The story is complex, with overtones that are varyingly dark and bright and intriguing. I think you could have conversations for hours about the characters in this book--their brief perceived brushes with perfection/God, their sense of loss as it slips away, their longing to experience it again, and the isolation that results from their individual obsessions with recapturing that moment of wholeness . . . I gave it 5 stars because I felt like the writing was so very, very good.

I would definitely recommend this book, with a warning that its tone of dysfunction is so vivid that it may pervade your personal life as you read it--but I wouldn't let that stop you, it's worth it.

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Suraroutray

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This book was uninspiring.

The voice was weird, at times acting like it wanted to reflect the characters, while other times, speaking as some weird detached narrator. I actually delineated a paragraph that bothered me to the point that I contemplated quitting on this book.

"Eliza's willingness to face a conceptual Marvin Bussy evaporates at the prospect of encountering the actual one even though she knows she'd have to do something really bad to get him to pick on a kindergartner. She has never witnessed Marvin's malice first hand. His cruelty, like sex, is something she has only heard about, something that only happens in places she doesn't go."

I'm sorry... but what? How does a scene about a kindergartner going to confront a bully end up talking about the kindergartner's perceptions of sex? Is that really a topic that wades around a kindergartner's mind for long?

The book as a whole reminded me of that line. It never seemed to quite know what it wanted to say or the right way to say it. Each of the story lines in the book was... interesting I guess. I didn't connect with them, but I was willing to go along with them. But none of the storylines felt quite right. Why were they there? What were they trying to convey? They didn't feel like they had the depth or soul to really become anything more.

What's more, the conclusion of the book was unsatisfying. I imagined it was going to end where it did early on, but the book never really sold you on why it should be there. I wanted to feel convinced this was something the characters really believed in when they made their decisions, but instead, I just felt like I was stuck going along for the ride.

Overall, I did enjoy the dynamics and relationships between the characters, but there wasn't much more than that to make this worth reading.

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Bears2002

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This was new for me, covering a lot of religious variations I don't know much about. It's also a kind of book unlike any I can recall reading, relatively short but chapterless, alternating between the four members of a family. It got more intense than I was expecting; each member of the family is to some extent deeply introverted and intensely focused on searching for a higher purpose and meaning in life, but in four very different directions with totally incompatible results. I was compelled by the story but the ending didn't offer me any closure; I can't imagine what happens next, but then again I don't really want to dwell on it.
It's a tragic story of missed and botched opportunities for communication and connection that set the characters spiraling in different directions. But, surprisingly, it doesn't make me see religion as the villain. I respect this individual seeking of God and beauty and peace and purpose. But it's ironic that rather than spreading love and building community, it's driven this family farther away from each other and from the people they're surrounded by. I'm not sure what to think, but it's intriguing and might make for a good discussion.

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Apple_Twinkle

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Eliza, an average fifth-grader, wins her school spelling bee, to her and every else’s surprise. As she goes on to more serious spelling competitions, her family members begin to question their own choices. Her 16-year-old brother considers converting from Judaism to another religion; her insomniac mother begins making strange trips to other neighborhoods; and her academic father reveals what’s really in all the books in his library. Eliza herself tries to figure out what she wants out of spelling and where she fits in her family.

I hated the narration. A lot. It was third-person omniscient, in present tense throughout, despite the fact that it moves in time. (“ Kaitlin read this book last week, and is thinking, ‘Huh, why does cousin Ali make me read this book?’ Now next Tuesday I am having a snack and thinking about seeing Despicable Me 2 last weekend. I am sitting in the top row, watching the minions…’)

I loved Miriam, the unstable mother, who was the only fully formed and understandable character, despite her mental illness. I found the brother’s story implausible and thought his mind worked more like a child’s. The father was OK but pointless.

I wish this book had been written from the mother’s perspective and touched on every member of the family, but without going into the details of their childhoods. With each character given equal weight, the story became overwrought with each character’s version of “but what does it all mean?” resulting in no cogent story at all. And, seriously, who questions his life because his kid sister can spell ‘neighbor’?

I would give this book 2.5 stars, though I dislike it more now that I've read my own review :-)

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Bee Season

myla goldberg

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Eliza Naumann

Saul Naumann

Miriam Naumann

Aaron Naumann

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About the author

myla goldberg

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