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Loading... Bee Season: A Novel (edition 2001)by Myla Goldberg
Work detailsBee Season by Myla Goldberg
I listened to the audiobook version, and I was glad to hear the story in the author's own voice--it added a lot. My favorite part of the book was the Eliza's run to the National Spelling Bee. Beyond that, the dysfunctions of various members of the family loomed so large that it became a bit draining to finish the audiobook. If you're looking for an uplifting book about a child's spelling success, this one isn't it. Still, the book was very thought-provoking. (  ) dukefan86 | May 29, 2013 |  To say that this book left me puzzled is an understatement. I really enjoyed Goldberg's careful construct: a seemingly normal family slowly coming apart due to miscommunication, mental illness, religious fanaticism and plain old teenage growing up. I also really enjoyed the discussion around religion: a child's acceptance, a teen's questioning, an adult's embracing. I also liked the fact that there are no easy answers: mom doesn't come home, Aaron doesn't agree and dad doesn't have all the answers. This is definitely what makes the end so powerful, but my real question is: has Elly really achieved enlightenment or is she schizophrenic like her mother (or epileptic)? I guess that's for each reader to determine according to each one's beliefs... This is not what I expected, but a book that I will cherish in all its weirdness and questions, loving but broken relationships and intriguing look at meditation in all its forms. (  ) Cecilturtle | May 18, 2013 | What could have been a wonderful book, and one full of depth turns out to be a very screwed up book, just as it's characters are. Too many twists in the plot and they get you nowhere, characters don't really change at all, you just get to see this kind of puppets being puppets all through the book and having no backbone or real character or even a real plot to go with. It's very sad it disappointed me so much, since I was expecting something better, it being made a movie and some people I think highly of recommending it to me. (  ) littlesparrow | Apr 2, 2013 | When choosing a book for the library discussion group, I was offered a list from a particular program the library uses. There really weren't many options, and none of the those I'd actually read before would be worth talking about. But [b:Bee Season|251762|Bee Season|Myla Goldberg|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327908650s/251762.jpg|2482870] had a compelling enough concept that I chose it despite only so-so reviews here on GR. Because at least people had found enough to talk about. And my group did talk about it. We talked lots about how it failed. To be clear, we all agreed that it wasn't a bad book, just a badly-executed one. There's something almost dishonest in the construction and manipulation of the characters, and the twist at the end failed for everyone, because of lack of setup and in the character type as portrayed. Goldberg clearly had something to say: likely about the pressure of academic success on children and father/daughter relationships. You could care about Eliza, and Saul was an interesting, but static, character study. The trip and fall near the end into the metaphysical wasn't really supported by the earlier plot, and again, the twist really only distracted from what the story had, up until then, been about. It's a build up of Eliza and her mother's story wasn't every really there, and didn't mean anything. And again, no one really changes in this book, though it seems intended as a character-driven work, the characters aren't enough to carry that description. If this one is already on your list for whatever reason, you may as well read it. But if your list is long and you're thinking of adding another, skip. You may as well use the time to read something really worth it. (  ) MarieAlt | Mar 31, 2013 | I liked it but didn't love it, but I didn't despise it like the loud members of my former book group did. Thank goodness I found a cooler book group! ( ) rkreish | Mar 31, 2013 |
 Myla Goldberg's first novel, ''Bee Season,'' is a dispassionate, fervidly intelligent book -- she explores class, linguistics and religious extremism with the confidence of a born essayist -- that comes by its emotion honestly.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0385498802, Paperback)In Myla Goldberg's outstanding first novel, a family is shaken apart by a small but unexpected shift in the prospects of one of its members. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann, an otherwise indifferent student, takes first prize in her school spelling bee, it is as if rays of light have begun to emanate from her head. Teachers regard her with a new fondness; the studious girls begin to save a place for her at lunch. Even Eliza can sense herself changing. She had "often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see."Eliza's father, Saul, a scholar and cantor, had long since given up expecting sparks of brilliance on her part. While her brother, Aaron, had taken pride in reciting his Bar Mitzvah prayers from memory, she had typically preferred television reruns to homework or reading. This belated evidence of a miraculous talent encourages Saul to reassess his daughter. And after she wins the statewide bee, he begins tutoring her for the national competition, devoting to Eliza the hours he once spent with Aaron. His daughter flowers under his care, eventually coming to look at life "in alphabetical terms." "Consonants are the camels of language," she realizes, "proudly carrying their lingual loads." Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful.... Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood.When Saul sees the state of transcendence that she effortlessly achieves in competition, he encourages his daughter to explore the mystical states that have eluded him--the influx of God-knowledge (shefa) described by the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Although Saul has little idea what he has set in motion, "even the sound of Abulafia's name sets off music in her head. A-bu-la-fi-a. It's magic, the open sesame that unblocked the path to her father and then to language itself." Meanwhile, stunned by his father's defection, Aaron begins a troubling religious quest. Eliza's brainy, compulsive mother is also unmoored by her success. The spelling champion's newfound gift for concentration reminds Miriam of herself as a girl, and she feels a pang for not having seen her daughter more clearly before. But Eliza's clumsy response to Miriam's overtures convinces her mother that she has no real ties to her daughter. This final disappointment precipitates her departure into a stunning secret life. The reader is left wondering what would have happened if the Naumanns' spiritual thirsts had not been set in restless motion. A poignant and exceptionally well crafted tale, Bee Season has a slow beginning but a tour-de-force conclusion. --Regina Marler (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:21:24 -0500) The bestselling, critically acclaimed debut novel about an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent for spelling. Annotation. Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidactic father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality, Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention previously reserved for Aaron, who in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual fulfillment. When Miriam's secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must order the chaos. Myla Goldberg's keen eye for detail brings Eliza's journey to three-dimensional life. As she rises from classroom obscurity to the blinding lights and outsized expectations of the National Bee, Eliza's small pains and large joys are finely wrought and deeply felt. Not merely a coming-of-age story, Goldberg's first novel delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome of this tale is as startling and unconventional as her prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. The work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller, Bee Season marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new writer.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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