Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful study of family dysfunction and spirituality
Review: A surprising little gem of a story -- surprising in its intensity and depth, given the length of the book (288 pages). A Jewish family of four (parents, teenage son and daughter) searches for meaning and connection, individually and with each other. The mother's secret obsession, the father and daughter's pursuit of success in a spelling bee, and the son's exploration of eastern religion all represent a search for meaning and fulfillment. The characters are well-developed, and the story moves at a good pace. The end is a bit over the top, and things are left unsatisfyingly unresolved; or maybe I just didn't want it to end. Still highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Painful and illuminating
Review: This was not the book I expected. The book's back cover promises an endearing look at modern family dynamics. The story does start out that way, but turns much darker about halfway through. First, the book does brilliantly delineate the secret ambivalence behind even the deepest love. Each character both sees and tries not to see the frailities in each other. They also successfully hide from themselves the inevitable selfishness lingering under their affection. Goldberg seems to say that ultimately, we are all alone with our illusions and our needs. Or are we? The two parents are both rarely gifted with the ability to approach God. Their genes combine and distill in their children, resulting in an ability not just to approach, but actually to see Him (or Her, or It. Whatever). Every person in the family searches for the ultimate connection. The parents don't quite make it. The kids do. Goldberg conveys an idea I've sensed but never articulated: as each character comes closer to God, an experience Goldberg invariably describes as a sense of deep connection to everyone and everything, they become more removed from ordinary life and from each other. The family actually falls apart because of each one's search for the divine. Eliza brings back a message after achieving enlightment: better to live here on Earth than in the unseen. I wasn't able to fully appreciate the magnificence of Goldberg's achievement until a few days after I finished because some of the book is quite painful to read, particularly Aaron's difficult adolescence. I can't help but add an ending in my head where he goes off to college and finally makes some friends.
______ ETA: I wanted to mention some of the smaller things I enjoyed about the book as well. First off, it's quite funny. I also liked Goldberg's exploration into why people go looking for God at all. She seems to say that it's often because they can't connect with other people, but ironically they disconnect even further as they become more spiritual. Finally, she makes some interesting points about how many different religions describe the sensations of enlightenment and how to get there. As another reviewer said, there is a LOT of chanting. I happened to like it, though.
Rating:
Summary: Letter-Perfect
Review: My mother left me this book after a recent visit, saying I might like it. I was puzzled, because I thought it was a Scholastic Books-type coming-of-age story of a young girl, with slightly more adult themes to explain its popularity. It does have a coming-of-age story, but that doesn't even begin to describe it. Eliza is a young girl who has been shunted off to the slow learners section of grade school. Memorable passages describe her bewildered transition from promising 2nd-grader to forgotten 5th-grader. (There is another book compressed inside this one about children whose potential is ignored or forgotten.) When she wins the school spelling bee, her disbelief is matched by her family's. From this point it is easy to imagine the rest of the book that could have followed, but this book is not an inspirational homily for teenagers. Although the spelling bee sections are given prominence and are very well written, Bee Season is really about something both bigger and darker. It meticulously, excruciatingly charts the mental state of a family that is fragmenting. All four members of the Naumann family have unique, secret obsessions that slowly redirect their outward behavior. There is an even-handed symmetry between their viewpoints that in lesser hands would simply be schematic, but here is a great source of power. In switching at regular intervals from one view to another, the similarities between Aaron's search for God, Saul's Kabbalism, Miriam's "collecting" and Eliza's spelling become clear: all are shown to be seductive but ultimately inhuman pursuits. The absolute certainty each family member holds is revealed to be deceptive, with eventual destructive consequences for all. If you have ever been forced to confront someone's mental illness, you will appreciate what happens. This is a much, much better book than some of the tepid and dismissive reviews here would indicate. It's not meant to be a page-turner; the events are allowed the time they require to unfold. The characters are not completely lovable; they are realistically portrayed, sometimes painfully. Whether or not you find the mystical passages believable (as I did), everything else is given without sentimentality and with heartbreaking sympathy. As befits a book about language, the writing is both streamlined and muscular, but it is the sense of balance between the characters that is most astonishing. We should all be so just.
Rating:
Summary: incredible
Review: Everyone is this family is a kook and I loved it.
Rating: 
Summary: Bee Season, a novel by Myla Goldberg; a review.
Review: Each of the four major characters in Myla Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, has a secret. They also have a near fatal flaw or wound within them, which they use their secret lives to manage, protect and heal. The novel focuses on an otherwise ordinary ten year old girl named Eliza Naumann, who becomes a spelling genius overnight. But it is also the story of Eliza's family and her touching desire for this odd, estranged cast of characters to just be normal for once and love each other, at any cost.
Eliza's father, Saul, is a Bohemian scholar of the Kabbalah--the academic tradition of Jewish mysticism--and is a unsuccessful, somewhat bitter contender to the mysteries himself. Eliza's troubled, brilliant mother, Miriam, may actually be a cruel living form of the mysteries Saul has failed to work out. She's even a mystery to the reader. It is mainly Eliza and her journey into the world of spelling bee culture that makes the reader drawn to this novel. Goldberg describes this strange cruel world of competition, anxiety, triumph and failure, all the way from the elementary school to the national level. Everyone has a story, a wound or a loss in this book, but Goldberg just happens to be focusing on one particular family. Eliza's delight in her new spelling bee successes quickly escalates into a cheerful recovery of her father's affections. Saul, who had written his daughter off as being unexceptional, sees new confirmation in her strange spelling ability. He begins to train Eliza in the discipline of the Kabbalah and sure enough, she is a natural. Eliza's previous happiness soon turns into a greedy quest for the joy she finds in the power of words. She moves from longing normal family love to hungering for a inspirational form of divine love that brings her closer to the same hunger driving her mother, brother and father in their own separate directions. Goldberg builds her threads intricately and slowly. Each slight and misunderstanding is obviously ripped from all-too-real life. Eliza's school and bee observations about achievement, non-achievement, and expectations are perfectly hurtful . The life of the other bee contestants is a beautiful tour of misery.
After reading this book, you will spend a lot of time second guessing your motivations for everything; especially your beliefs about your interactions with others. Although Bee Season is a grim story, it is told with great wit and there is an earned positive ending. This is a novel that men and women off all ages would really enjoy because it provides much insight on life itself and how we see ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: The Bee's Knees
Review: I picked up this book last night to start reading and couldn't put it down until it was finished a few hours later. The writing is truly mesmerizing. I'd heard good things about this debut novel from Myla Goldberg, but was not prepared for the assault/onslaught of words, feelings, emotions, and ideas that she has conjured up. The premise of an underachieving, self-conscious child excelling at spelling - of all things - is intriguing enough; but when Ms. Goldberg begins adding sibling rivalry, Jewish mysticism, religious fervor, intellectual coldness, family secrets, and childhood eccentricities into the mix, well, I was hooked. A thoroughly intelligent read with bursts of inspired imagery and plot twists, this is one great American novel about one of the greatest subjects of Americana - spelling bees. Oh, but don't be fooled: there's so much more to this novel than that. I think you'll be(e) pleasantly surprised.
Rating: 
Summary: A Book Worth Forgetting
Review: What a disappointment. The ending was predictable, the characters lost their credibility, and the author didn't bother to finish the story. When I finished reading "Bee Season" I prayed for an attack of amnesia.
Rating:
Summary: Spectacular
Review: This was probably one of the most interesting books I have read. First of all the whole concept of a book with a spelling bee is brilliant. Myla Goldberg has a great imagination and knack to make something so simple become so realistic.
Basically this is a story about Eliza, in a way she is a child prodigy with her abilit to spell and take letters and words into a whole new meaning. Not only does this reveal who Eliza is but it unwravels a story about eahc of her family members: Mariam-mother, Saul-father, and Aaron-brother.
This book took me back and I had to reread a lot of pages just to make sure I was taking in what was really happen. It is a spectacular book.
Rating:
Summary: Uneven And Bizarre..
Review: Like many people who pick up this book,I too also thought it was going to be exclusively about the "Spelling Bee Experience" which,in itself is an interesting enough subject. Then the book goes off in to some very out there tangents,especially dealing with the mother of the spelling whiz : a very disurbed Kleptomanic. The father, meanwhile, is wonderfully kind(if slightly out of touch) and supportive mentor to his daughter Eliza. Finally, the older brother is a more realistic character: unhappy teenager who is trying to find himself by trying out another religion besides Judisiam. The end of the book was not accessiable at all,with the girl going off into an other-wordly experience merely by chanting from a book about the Kabballah (btw,there is ALOT of chanting in this story). If you want to read something that is not really at all what you expected it to be,I suggest this book.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful, only slightly mental.
Review: the book does start out very nicely; story of the underdog becoming a winner, getting well-deserved praise, etc. then, we get to know the girl's surroundings: her mom and dad, and her brother, and suddenly they're as much a part of the book as any. it becomes sort of like '24', at a point: the book splitting to frames and describing all four characters individually. and then, they don't seem close at all. they are very much into their own spirituality, their own ideas of perfection and closeness to god. there's the father, who stays the same throughout the entire book. there's the mother, who goes from a certain moderation to an extreme. the brother, exploring the world. eliza naumann - being lead by her father through an unknown path like a blindfolded sheep. there is not a lot of love there, except for the constant search for knowledge. the book is very impressive, in many ways: beautiful writing, interesting processes, gives a new perspective to linguistics and mystiscism. however, as each character progresses, there's an obvious distance between the reader and the events, and there are things in the book that might disturb the casual reader.
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