Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season is a spiritual coming of age story that revolves around the dysfunctional Naumann family. Eliza and her older brother, Aaron, have a surprisingly close relationship despite their six year age difference. This closeness stems from their mother’s cold distance and father’s immersion in his job as the cantor of Beth Amicha Synagogue.
Amidst her father, Saul’s, religious fervor, which causes him to urge Aaron in the direction of becoming a Rabbi, Eliza is the forgotten one in the family. No one expects much from her, especially her mother, Miriam, a focused lawyer who we are introduced to as “a hummingbird in human form, her wings too fast to be seen without a stop-motion camera.”
But when Eliza wins the fifth grade spelling bee and advances to compete nationally, Saul can’t deny his guilt at neglecting her. And when Eliza admits to her trance-like way of visualizing the words in her mind before spelling them, Saul realizes she may be the one to advance the cause of Jewish mysticism he’d worked so hard at all his adult life.
Eliza takes Aaron’s place in Saul’s beloved study and Aaron seizes the opportunity to spend more time with his new friend, Chali, who turns out to be a Hare Krishna. As Eliza advances to the national bee, the family's relationships strain at their seams: Saul becomes obsessed with her potential realization of his dream to decode the mystery of a series of books written as instructions to achieve true communication with God; Aaron throws himself into his new religion; and we find out the hidden depths of Miriam’s own obsessive-compulsive behavior.
Bee Season is truly a novel about the obsessions that drive us in the pursuit of perfection, and how those obsessions often spill over to the detriment of our relationships with those we love.
275 pages.
