Rating: 
Summary: Bizzare
Review: While it is possible to believe that parents can be destructive of their children, the level of self-indulgence of its main character and his focus on only himself and his dreams makes him (and thus the book)a bit annoyng. Bee Season is a rather disturbing book. Overall,its main character (Saul who is a mother-father figure), while striving to be a "perfect father", was not one at all, that was just an image he tried to project,but he didn't fool his kids at all, so they rebelled. First he favored the son over the daughter (why?) then he switched to favoring the daughter over the son (why?). And he really didn't seem to have their best interests at heart, but tried to have them fulfill HIS goals and dreams instead of their own. All that is fairly normal, actually, but when you combine it with his total denial of the fact that his wife was crazy (which he should have realized a lot earlier, with her mysterious behavior), then it becomes truly dysfunctional. One thing about that book, it does make one understand why some mixed-up but intelligent kids get involved in cults. Before I read it, I couldn't figure out how they could get hooked like that. But what else can one gather from reading this book? Why did it need to include mysticism? What purpose did it serve? To make it more bizzare or more appealing? Appealing to who and why? If it strived for being bizzare, and if this was the author's goal, she definitely achieved some success. The question to ask is how long this book will continue to be of any interest to the readers? One should question its depth and its goal.
Rating: 
Summary: Intricate, compelling read!
Review: Bee Season is a startling and compelling debut novel. When we first meet the Naumann family, everyone seems fairly average: almost overbearing father, gifted yet nerdy older son, career-driven mother, and middle of the road younger daughter. But as the story unfolds, we see these people are ultimately not as we saw them at the beginning. The title Bee Season is a tad misleading, as really the actual spelling bees constitute a small proportion of the novel. Rather, the complexities emerge when we are privy to young Eliza's amazing transformation and its profound effect on the Naumann family.
Rating:
Summary: so-so
Review: Bee Season is probably not like any other book you've read. I found it mildly interesting, though the omniscient narration was very distracting. I had a hard time with some of Goldberg's characterizations of the family's children, Aaron and Eliza--some very adult characteristics were ascribed to them. Miriam (the mother)'s character was wholly unconvincing to me. I admire Goldberg for taking on difficult subject matter. But I think her characters needed more flesh. I could see right through them.
Rating: 
Summary: the center does not hold
Review: a fifth of the way through Bee Season, i stopped reading and began skimming, having found the eliza & co. uncompelling. goldberg's characters are drawn almost one-dimensionally, their idiosyncrasies pinned to the anaesthetising table and explained, rather than shown, to the reader. also, the writing style seemed forced. every 2-3 pages, goldberg would halt one thread of narration and embark on another one, usually to step back into the past to fill in a character's idiosyncrasy or history. thus, every couple pages there was a disconnect in the dialogue with the reader, and the overall effect was one of parataxis. the descants did not flow; the histories seemed forced, the writing self-conscious. the characters didn't cohere with each other, and the demi-chapters didn't (to me) cohere into a graceful story. when i got to one of those historical parts that described aaron's difficult adolescence, in which his voice didn't change for the longest time and eliza notices that for a year the word "puberty" is never spoken, i started skimming. how many 9-year-olds would note the loss of "puberty" for a year? that was the straw that broke the camel. how wonderful, though, to be able to put a book down, knowing you're not beholden to wade through it, that you can move onto the next oeuvre on the To Be Read shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Spelling bees change a little girl's life
Review: Myla Goldberg's debut novel is a very enjoyable account of young Eliza Neumann's change in status in her family's eyes. See, Eliza has been an underachiever all her life, a "student from whom great things should not be expected" and when she suddenly starts winning spelling bees, she bumps her brother Aaron off from his Favorite Child pedestal. Eliza's father, a cantor, suddenly gives his daughter permission to enter into his world (and his study) while ignoring the son he has favored all along. This is a catalyst for Aaron as well, who begins to look for what is now missing in his life in other places. The mother, meanwhile, is quite horrible, and her journey is also not one to be missed. All in all, this book can be quite depressing at times, but it has hilarious moments, and the writing is very accessible. Ms. Goldberg's debut novel is, hopefully, only a sign of even better things to come.
Rating:
Summary: The Unraveling Fabric of Family Life
Review: The Naumanns are an ordinary Jewish family. Saul, the father, is a cantor who spends much of his time in his study absorbed in Jewish mysticism and he considers himself to be the respected head of the household; Miriam, the mother, is a successful but emotionally distant attorney who also does her best to keep the house clean and food on the table; Aaron, the son, is intelligent, if somewhat nerdy, and, much to his father's delight, he wants to become a rabbi someday, he is the vessel of all of his father's spiritual ambitions; Eliza, the daughter, is the disappointment of the family because she is the only one who does not seem to be "gifted" in some special way. Instead of studying like her brother, Eliza would rather spend her afternoons watching television reruns. The conflicts and problems these characters face seem, on the surface, to be the ordinary conflicts all families must deal with: competition, work, expectations. By the end of this amazing book, however, these "ordinary" illusions are shattered as each character's internal struggles prove stronger than the synthetic family unit. The pivotal occurrence in the Naumann's family life is nothing more than an ordinary spelling bee. Eliza, wins, first the elementary school spelling bee, then the district bee, the state bee and finally is propelled into the national bee. As the Naumann's come to realize this daughter is not quite as ordinary as they thought, things begin to change. Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention he previously reserved for Aaron, who, in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual and emotional fulfillment. The picture the Naumann family presents as they proceed to fall apart can, at times, be very funny, and by the end of the novel nothing is as it seemed to be or as it should be. Although it is anticipated from the beginning of the book, it is the struggle between the father and his children that is the most emotionally interesting, since Saul is a deep and emotional thinker, a "Cheerleader Mom" who cannot see his own faults. Although Goldberg has a keen eye for detail that brings her characters to life, the book is not without its faults. Some of Eliza's struggles to discover her own mystic talents become dry as much of the theory and subsequent trances are written in great detail from the mind of a nine year old child. The struggles between Aaron and his father become a little tiring and Aaron's break is complete long before his struggles end on paper. In contrast, Miriam's struggles and ultimate transformation occur too abruptly. Her psyche is odd and not well-revealed. Still, Bee Season is the work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller and it delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome is unconventional, as is Goldberg's prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. This is a different sort of book about an altogether too familiar subject and it will certainly enrich and enliven anyone who reads it.
Rating: 
Summary: Beeing close to the face of God
Review: Beyond the dynamics of a family losing its way, Bee Season puts readers in touch with the very Jewish concept that one cannot see the face of God. Yet, in directing his daughter towards mystical perfection, Saul encourages her to attempt just that. At the same time, son Aaron mounts his own quest to see God through the chants of Hare Krishna, while Miriam, the mother, attempts perfection in a psychotic organization of stolen trinkets. It is only Eliza herself who averts her gaze and changes her path, after a mystical confrontation with the Almighty leaves her nearly destroyed. This is a brilliant first novel whose truths run far deeper than an Oprah-esque story of family dysfunction. And it's a good read, too.
Rating:
Summary: Sorry, Amazon..but save your money, folks.
Review: The premise was good. An unnoticed little girl gets her break when she learns she's a good speller. She begins to emerge as a somebody in her parents eyes...And bam- the reader finds out that the parents are too insane to ever really meet her need for love and approval. And then the plot goes down (it never really left the ground). This book was really strange. Esoteric. Dark and depressing. Ancient Hebrew chanting rituals. Hare Krishnas. Kleptomananics. All in the same house and unaware of each others idiosyncracies. It was just too far out. I love the bizarre but this one I could not recommend. Moments of good writing but certainly not a book for most people. There's too many other good books out there to read- skip this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Better Luck Next Season
Review: This book fell apart midway and never regained the spunk and the promise of its first few chapters. Myla Golberg has an obvious gift for writing; I can't remember the last time I was so engaged in a book about children and the screwed up adults in their lives--at least initially. Despite pressure-packed spelling bees, vivid characters and interesting plot twists, Golberg's book deteriorated into the trite and predictable. Her forays into mysticism (if that's what they were) detracted from the story. I look forward to the next Goldberg novel. Maybe she'll learn from her mistakes.
Rating:
Summary: Myla Goldberg is a master word craftsman
Review: When I started reading this novel, I felt like I could happily spend the whole day in my recliner with this novel. I love to find new voices, that I expect to provide me with many future jewels of novels. Only a few authors seem to have the gift of taking the english language and making it sing. Mayla Goldberg is gifted in this way. She shows us our characters many facets.
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