Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
Oh my, I’ve waited to long after reading Bee Season by Myla Goldberg to review it. The details are no longer fresh in my mind. When I bought this book (I obviously didn’t read the synopsis) I thought I was buying the book associated with the Akeelah and the Bee movie. I was a few pages in when I thought, weird they changed the story sooo much. The main character isn’t even African-American, she’s Jewish. They don’t come from a troubled neighborhood, in fact the family seems quite well off. I kept thinking, wow, this isn’t anything like the Akeelah and the Bee movie. And that’s when I realized this was actually the other spelling bee story also made into a movie called Bee Season. Funny huh, Bee Season the book and Bee Season the movie. I think I should have been able to figure that out, and I’ve seen that movie too! And then the details of the movie came back to me and it all started to make sense.
Although you would think that this book is about Eliza, a medicore student who makes it to the national spelling bee, but it’s more about the entire family dynamics. And believe me, this is one very strange messed-up family. Everybody has problems and this family is literally falling apart. Can Eliza pull them back together?
From the book jacket:
Eliza Naumann has no reason to believe she is anything but ordinary, especially after her teachers place her in the class for slow learners. Her father, Saul, dotes on her older brother Aaron’s rabbinical ambitions. Her mother, Miriam, seems fully absorbed by her law career. When a spelling bee threates to reaffirm her mediocrity, Eliza amazes everyone: she wins. Her newfound gift gardners an invitation not only to the national competition, but to her father’s sacred study where a new dictionary beckons, Jewish mysticism lurks in leather tomes, and language offers a spiritual awakening.
Eliza’s unexpected success sends her off-kilter family into a tailspin, and Eliza comes to depend upon her own divination to hold the family together. With intense imagination and great emotional acuity, Bee Season evokes a child’s desperate longing for praise and acceptances and is a masterful portrayal of modern family life.
If you’d like a peek into the movie, here’s a video:
I enjoyed this debut novel from Myla Goldberg. The writing was beautiful, and the story was intriguing. Has anybody read this book? What did you think?
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Tags: A-D Title, book to movie, coming of age, E-H Author, female author, Fiction, videos
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I read this last year and thought it was decent. Didn’t love it, but definitely worth the read. Deeper than I thought it was going to be, so that was nice.
on March 31st, 2008 at 6:23 amThat’s kind of funny that you mixed up two spelling bee books/movies. Looks like it turned out to be a good book anyways.
on March 31st, 2008 at 6:57 amHA! I do this all the time, pick up books because I think they’re other books. Like the time I picked up ‘A Recipe for Bees’ because I was thinking of ‘The Secret Life of Bees,’ or the time I grabbed ‘The Piano Man’s Daughter’ when it was ‘The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter’ my friend had recommended. The mind is a slipper thing.
on March 31st, 2008 at 7:48 amI can’t decided if I want to read this or not. I keep wavering and so I have not added it to my TBR list…yet.
on March 31st, 2008 at 12:44 pmThe movie put me to sleep, but I was interested in the story, the girl, and the family. I might pick this one up at some point.
on April 1st, 2008 at 7:42 amI haven’t read it, but I did see a copy at the store the other day and wondered about it. I don’t think I’ve seen the movie either. Wow, I’m in the dark! Thanks for the review.
on April 2nd, 2008 at 6:35 amI read Bee Season years ago and LOVED it, especially the character of the mother, and the description of her storage locker. I loved the blending of mysticism, religion and family dynamics. I really empathized with Eliza, felt for her brother, and wanted the family to come together.
At the time, I got it confused with the other popular Bee book, The Secret Life of Bees, which I hated. I know I’m in the minority on that one, but I didn’t feel the narrator had an authentic child’s voice, and I didn’t like some of the racial cliches the author used as emotional buttons.
on April 5th, 2008 at 8:01 amI’m like Jeanette, not sure if this is a book I want to read. But I’ll probably see it in a bookstore, remember reading about it and buy it.
on April 5th, 2008 at 8:36 amI reviewed Bee Season here:
http://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=1710
I thought it was a little . . . odd.
on April 5th, 2008 at 6:30 pmThere is a lot of bee books! I just read a review from Eva on a book I swear I had read (I even have it!) but actually it’s not the same book at all. There are so many books, it is easy to get confused!
on April 6th, 2008 at 3:36 pmI have heard of this book, but honestly forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me to add it to my TBR pile.
on April 27th, 2008 at 5:10 amJust read this one and I’m happy I stumbled on your post. The end left craving more opinions on what ending meant. Is it life affirming? Is it a minor tragedy? Either way, I enjoyed the book overall. I absolutely loved the first half, in which the ordinariness of what’s happening let the emotional content stand out, but the revelations of the second half kept me intrigued, though not as gripped.
on January 28th, 2009 at 7:13 pmI just read this book, and LOVED IT until the last page. I’m not sure why Eliza did what she did and feel I’m missing something. Did she want to thwart her father and his attempt to reach God through her? Did she want her family to simply go back to the way it was before the Bee? Did she have a bad mystical trip and want to step back from God (which seems a weird idea)? Any one?
on March 28th, 2009 at 10:10 pmI was absolutely in love with the book in the beginning, being a spelling bee enthusiast myself, but then all of a sudden, the book took this dramatic turn into dark, depressing, and dare I say it, horrific. It went from sunshine and rainbows to slasher flick within the span of a few pages. At first, the jumping from scene to random scene was charming, but after a while, it just became annoying. I got bored a third of the way in and skipped to the end. Didn’t miss a thing.
on May 15th, 2011 at 8:35 pm[...] Review #4 [...]
on August 2nd, 2011 at 2:36 pm