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    Bee Season
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    Bee Season
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    Bee Season
    Audiobook12 hours

    Bee Season

    Published by Recorded Books Audio

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 15, 2008
    ISBN9781449801076
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Bee Season

    3.5/5

    1,149 ratings58 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is the story of a young girl who has a difficult time in school until she discovers a talent for spelling. It is also the story of a father who gets carried away in trying to help his daughter win. This book reminded me that it is good to remember that everyone has a talent and the world is filled with people who on the surface look ordinary but below the surface are extraordinary. The father's behavior disturbed me throughout the book.
    • 4/5
      This was another one of my whimsy books - I go to buy a book in the bookstore, and then choose another random one from the same shelf. This one turned out to be another wise choice. I know I was supposed to be concentrating on the main character (Eliza Naumann) through her spelling bee adventures. And that's what I was doing through the first half of the book. But after the her first National Bee competition, I became increasingly drawn to her mother Miriam and her brother Aaron. By the end of the novel all I wanted to know was the status of those characters. Strange - but definitely enjoyable.
    • 1/5
      Starts well, but fails to deliver. The main character, 10-year-old Eliza, surprises her achievement-oriented father by winning the district spelling championship. But then all kinds of Kabalistic mysticism takes over and an otherwise good story is, in my opinion, waylaid.1 starRead 8/2000
    • 3/5
      Unfinished as of this review and don't know if I can bring myself to spend any more time with this cast of unlikable and fairly uninteresting characters. While each person displays elements of the curiosities of human nature (Miriam steals, Aaron seeks religious truth) the pacing is stodgy and in 168 pages Goldberg hasn't given me, the reader, any reason to care what happens to any of them.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant, original, fascinating - and I thank my lucky stars I wasn't born into that family. I read it because the focus is about the daughter's unexpected prowess in spelling bees, but the book really revolves around the family and all their odd interactions. Not a cheerful or uplifting book, though it does encourage our faith in hope and in resiliency.
    • 4/5
      I didn't read this book but instead I listened to it. I think that I would have enjoyed it even more if I had read it instead because the visual distraction of listening allows one's mind to wander. Also, it took much longer to complete because the narrator spoke much slower than I would have read. The voices however did give this book a different feel from books that I have read on my own because they do not take my tone but that of the author/reader. I especially liked this book because it taught me a little bit about the Hare Krishna, who I was always been interested in.
    • 5/5
      At the center of the book is the relationship between father (Saul) and daughter (Eliza). Eliza, who had previously been passed over for gifted classes, is suddenly a spelling prodigy. The father's interest in her awakens and he puts all his energy into tutoring her. The dynamics of this family changes. Eliza's brother (until now, Saul's favorite) set of on a spiritual journey. The mother's secret obsession leads her into riskier situations. Although I've described it in melodramatic terms, the novel is beautifully written and understated. (And I thought the movie, unlike many novel-based movies, stood up well to the book.)
    • 2/5
      I hated this book. Sorry, but I did. I picked to read it for a summer reading assignment, and soon regretted it. For a long time is follows you’re typical Spelling Bee plotline, and seldom derives from it. The subplot about the son who joins some cult is more annoying than interesting. And I couldn’t care less about the parent’s failing marriage. And can someone explain to me why I’m supposed to enjoy a story about some girl finding God in words and how I’m even supposed to believe that by reading all these books she transcends to some magical lever of higher being? The only part of the book I liked was the story of the mother, who has a mental disorder and is compelled to steal things. I actually found this very interesting to read about and find her journey the most enjoyable. But besides that, there’s really no point to reading this book. Don’t waste your time.
    • 5/5
      The story is heartbreaking and magnificent! It is about finding wholeness and a personal sense of being. I could absolutely relate to each one of the characters. By the book's end, I was left wondering what was next for this poor, broken family. Will Eliza be able to save them all? I guess the point is that to save, we must sacrifice a piece of ourselves. By losing the Bee, Eliza aids in the breakdown of the empty search for truth each member of her family is on.
    • 5/5
      My favorite book. A quirky novel with a number of surprises. Incidentally, I helped host Myla Goldberg at a book event and thought she was delightful.
    • 3/5
      Bee Season left me confused and slightly-swindled-feeling. The dissonance, I suppose, results from a certain wishing-to-have-cake-and-eat-it-too impression that I got. On the one hand, it seems to want to show how there are many paths toward personal and spiritual transcendence; on the other hand, it wants to be a miserable downer about familial dissolution. These things don't really go together, so Goldberg is forced to pull the cork just as everything goes to hell for everybody involved, cheating the reader out of any resolution from either the spiritual-journey or miserable-family angle.The Naumann family, who all yearn for excuses to escape one another, finally get them when young daughter Eliza wins her school spelling bee. As a result, overbearing patriarch Saul decides to engage Eliza in hours-long one-on-one spelling sessions, using thousand-year-old hogwash for textbooks. Their evenings no longer taken up with being annoyed to death by Saul, mother Miriam and brother Aaron use their newly free time to follow their own rigidly parallel paths toward transcendence. While Eliza rearranges words in her head a whole bunch in search of Enlightenment (the Jewish version of which, I guess, is called, shefa). Aaron joins Hare Krishna to take his mind off the constant swirlies he receives at school, and Miriam burgles her way to miraculous feats of interior decoration. Goldberg takes great care to make sure we notice just how similar these activities are to each other; Aaron's ceaseless chanting mirrors Eliza's meditative anagramming, and Miriam's sculpture just applies the same obsessive tendencies to found-object art. With brief interludes so that Saul can provide stock bad-father moments and drive his children and wife further up the wall, things proceed thusly until the end the novel, when everybody reaches their spiritual journey's climax on the exact same day. Because it's just more convenient that way, is why. All right?Eliza has an intensely spiritual epileptic seizure which, it seems, we are supposed to believe has driven her over the edge into full-blown shefa. Aaron leaves home to pursue his dream of being a vegetarian chef at the temple, and Miriam is finally caught, bringing her eighteen-year klepto spree to an end. At this point, Goldberg seems to have written herself into a corner: if this thing is to really follow through on these characters' stories, it needs at least three hundred more pages of the characters acting almost completely independently of one another, which would break the family-drama mold that has been so faithfully clung to so far. Plus, Goldberg has just changed her main character into a Kabbalah superhero, which is just kind of weird. Really? It just worked? She read the books and flipped around the letters and it worked. Can everybody do that? Can I level-up my letter-flipping skills till I reach shefa too? Sadly, the path to transcendence hasn't worked out so well for the other protagonists: Aaron appears to be on some sort of spiritual journey, but the last thing we see him do is pretty much give the finger to Dad as he drives away, which doesn't really sound like a great start on the road toward inner peace, and the last we know of Miriam is that she's cackling to herself in Arkham Asylum.I'm wondering why things are supposed to have worked out so well for Eliza, but not for Aaron and Miriam. It seems like the whole point of the novel, up until the last ten pages, is that Eliza's, Aaron's, and Miriam's spiritual journeys are just different aspects of the very same crippling OCD. Ha ha, no, really though, Goldberg seems to be making a case for a Unitarianism of all religions, until she decides to just drop it and declare that nope, Abulafia really had it right all along. The Eliza-superhero cannot be reconciled with the thrust of the entire rest of the novel. It just doesn't make any sense.I feel that Goldberg, in trying to wrap up the mess her book had become, followed a similar path as I take when trying to wrap Christmas gifts. At first, I proceed carefully, measuring the paper to match the dimensions of the gift. As I proceed, though, I find I have made some miscalculation, and having no more paper to try again with, attempt to cheat to make everything fit together nicely. Finally, though, I am forced to admit to myself that this whole wrapping thing just hasn't gone according to plan, and I take big swaths of duct tape and press them over the more egregiously horrible spots, and I brace myself for the derisive laughter of my relatives. Bee Season is that hastily-wrapped-up, not-quite-all-together gift.But overall, it didn't suck too bad.
    • 3/5
      This book was not what I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be a story of a girl who overcomes adversity to make it to the national spelling bee. That did happen, but that story line played itself out within the first hundred pages. Then it transitioned into a story of a family in which each person was living his or her own life apart from everyone else, with each on their own quest for meaning, perfection, and understanding of the divine. The content got heavier and heavier, and less and less tied to reality. I actually like books about religion and mysticism, and had I been looking for that at this time, I probably would have liked this book much better. As it was, I just ended up frustrated at reading yet another story about unfulfilled, unhappy people.
    • 3/5
      A book describing in exquisitely painful detail the pressures families put on its members, generation to generation. The answer to the labyrinth is never a simple one nor is it one most can receive from their parents. But in rare cases, sometimes the children unlock the key for themselves.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Of Myla Goldberg's style I can merely say "Brilliant" and "Beautiful." Ms. Goldberg takes something as mundane and dry as spelling and makes it into a work of art. It becomes an internal symphony of the soul when seen through the eyes of Eliza:"When Eliza studies, she travels through space and time. In COUCOUS she can sense desert and sand smoothed stone. In CYPRESS, she tastes salt and wind. She visits Africa, Greece, and France. Each word has a story; a Viking birth, a journey across the sea, the exchange from mouth to mouth, from border to border until aepli is appel is APPLE crisp and sweet on Eliza's tongue. When it is night and their studying is complete, these are the words she rides into sleep. The voice of the dictionary is the voice of her dreams"But apart from the story of Eliza and her gift is the story of her family. While I am not one to desire a rainbows and sunshine ending, I had hoped to see some chance of redemption for the members of Eliza's family. However the end of the story leaves the reader with no more hope that any member of the family, with the exception of Eliza, has become less self absorbed than they were in the beginning. I would like to say that I didn't like the book because I couldn't relate to the family, however three weeks later, I am still thinking about the book and trying to define my feelings regarding it. In my mind, that makes it a book worthy of reading.
    • 4/5
      Nine year-old Eliza Naumann is somewhat of an afterthought in her family. Her father is a well-respected Hebrew scholar, her mother a lawyer. Her older brother, Aaron, shows promise of becoming a rabbi. When Eliza begins to win spelling bees at the local and regional levels, her fortunes change. Her father directs his attention to her, leaving her mother and her brother to exist in their own worlds. Saul believes that Eliza is capable of reaching the highest level of spirituality possible. His wife, Miriam, has a secret life which leads to a family crisis. Aaron questions his faith and seeks spiritual alternatives. The characterizations of each family member contributes to a compelling read. The author gives a wonderful performance, using a perfect voice for each character.
    • 1/5
      I did not like this one bit.
    • 3/5
      Goldberg's Bee Season contains your typical dysfunctional family: a klepto wife, a religious father, a wayward son and a daughter who develops a talent for spelling. Good read!
    • 5/5
      Bee Season is the story of four members of a family all seeking to find their religious, or pseudo-religious, ecstasy. Saul is a devout Jew and auto-didact, who holes himself in his study to pore over his books. His wife Miriam is a perfectionist lawyer harboring a secret habit of kleptomania. Their son Aaron finds himself drawn to the Hare Krishnas, and their daughter Eliza would just like to be good at something for once. She finds her first outlet in spelling bees, but with her father's help it progresses into the search for the secret name of God through permutations of the Torah. Because, if she figures it out, it would be just like having a "red phone" to God, who could then fix her family from the mess it is slowly becomingThis was a very sweet book with a lot of heart and thought behind the characters. It's very similar to Little Miss Sunshine (for its aspects of competition and family dynamics), and the added level of religious longing make it very poignant; I found myself wanting to experience the zeal of a new convert that Aaron has, or the tenacious sincerity of Eliza. Very good book, with a heartfelt narrative that touches on a lot of issues
    • 4/5
      When Eliza discovers her talent for spelling, her father Saul devotes a great deal of time and energy to helping her develop this talent, causing his son Aaron to find fulfilment elsewhere. A really interesting and thought provoking read, dealing with family relationships, religion, and mental illness.
    • 3/5
      I loved the first part of this book, the character-driven story of a girl who uncovers a hidden talent for spelling and a route to her self-absorbed parents' attention. Equally pleasing was the story of her parents' every day struggles with their relationship. Regrettably, the second half detours through Jewish mysticism and a strange kleptomania/sculpting obsession. I found that part of the story significantly less realistic and harder to relate to. The ending is perfect though.
    • 3/5
      For the most part well written, I just didn't really enjoy. Family story, some plot elements were awkward and I felt uncomfortable with them as a religious Jew.
    • 3/5
      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!
    • 4/5
      I'll admit that the deciding factor in buying this book was the photo of the author, Myla Goldberg, on the back cover. I took one look at her big glasses, clunky shoes and Pippi Longstocking tights and thought, "oh, I definitely want to read what she has to say!" And I was not disappointed.Eliza has never been the standout in her family. Her mother is a successful lawyer, her brother is a prodigy and her father is fully invested in making sure her brother becomes a rabbi. Eliza is in the class for slow learners and no one expects much of her. When she wins the school spelling bee, she doesn't even bother to tell anyone.As Eliza racks up more spelling bee wins, the balance in the family begins to change and everyone must reevaluate their role. Her brother certainly begins to re-think his plan to become a rabbi. His father shifts his focus entirely onto his suddenly-brilliant daughter. And is so often the case, the biggest changes in the family come from out of left field, as Miriam's secrets cause the family to remake itself yet again.
    • 4/5
      I can not imagine this as a movie. Way too many thoughts/feelings/actions, and a huge span of time. I enjoyed the book, and was pleased with the writing style. Tension between the family members built nicely, and the ending was more than I expected.
    • 4/5
      This story about how a Philadelphia suburban dysfunctional family's individual search for God consumes them around the time the youngest member's previously dormant talents start to shine and make her a spelling bee star.The champion speller is Eliza, who was previously categorized as unremarkable and was an unspoken embarrassment by her more illustrious family members. When she starts winning spelling bees, her father, Saul, finally takes notice of her and she replaces his eldest son with his time and concentration. Saul gave up the swinging bachelor life for the idealized life of a Jewish scholar, getting married to attain a quiet study and a life partner that would help him concentrate and learn how to speak to God. The best he could do was attain the position of cantor, but in Eliza he sees the potential to speak to God through the way she has a kinship with the alphabet. Previously, his son Aaron, who was a wunderkind with Hebrew prayers and wanted to be a rabbi, was supposed to lead Saul to God. However, Aaron is ignored by Saul until he realizes that the divide between them is too wide, and it is too late.When time with his father is cut off and discouraged, Aaron looks for God elsewhere than his father's study. He tries out different religions until one fits and changes his whole way of life to the point he can no longer comfortably live at home.Meanwhile, his mother Miriam, who always had OCD-like tendencies to scrub and clean into the wee hours searches for God through perfection, or the word she prefers: "Perfectimundo." Yet her quest for perfection is hardly harmless as she is driven to steal from stores and houses in her quest to find the one object that will make her perfect. This obsession since childhood sends her down a spiral of lies and shatters her family. The family's failure to communicate with one another is their downfall: They are so obsessed with their own personal journeys to find God, that they are strangers to one another. Their ways of trying to reach God is oftentimes fierce, and Goldberg shines in the surreal descriptions of their hallucinations. It is easy to get caught up in the Naumanns' lives, as very personal things are revealed about them so that even in their most dysfunctional moments, we feel for them. Saul is less sympathetic because his obliviousness has made his children social outcasts, but when it all comes crashing down upon him, Goldberg can make us feel his desperation and sudden realization of his action's consequences. This is a great character study, but can be disturbing at times. Things like Miriam's decent into madness and Saul's treatment of his least-favored child of the moment can make you want to shake these people. Other scenes overwhelm , like Eliza's mystical spelling hallucinations as they get more and more intense. An interesting book on the whole, but I don't know if I would read it again, as it is emotionally draining. I think those interested in Jewish mysticism would enjoy this best.
    • 4/5
      A facinating study of a family of four, each trying to find the piece of themselves not provided by their lives, their family relationships, or their religion. With Zmrzlina, I'm not sure eccentric is the term I'd use to describe them. Incredibly needy, perhaps. Untethered. The heroine, Eliza, is a particularly engaging girl; the mother, conspicuous by her absence in the early story lines, achingly mad. The father Saul, who turned years ago from a background of hallucinogenic seeking, nevertheless tries for a God-invoked nirvana. And the brother Aaron becomes increasingly disengaged from the family as Saul turns from him to heap time, pride, love and expectations on Eliza.A very worthwhile book, especially for a first work.
    • 5/5
      This was one of the most suprising reads I have ever come across. What looked like a book about a previously undistiguished girl who rises to the high reaches of the National Spelling Bee, and the family around her; turned out to be a book about Jewish Mysticism, Hare Krisnas, kleptomania, responsibilities to parents and children and the notion of perfectomundo.Eliza Naumann is the odd one out in her family. Her father is a scholar and cantor at the local temple, her mother a brilliant lawyer and her brother was identified early for the Talented and Gifted program. In second grade Eliza is passed over for the TAG program by the classics educated teacher who fancies herself as working for the Fates. But in fourth grade she wins her class spelling bee, followed by the school bee, setting forth a series of events that will tear her family apart.The book is written in a light manner, despite the heavy material, making it easy to rip through. It slips easily from one point of view to another, and back again. My only quibble is that occasionally it is difficult to tell if an event has happened in the past or present as the book is written all in present tense. The ending left me gobsmacked - I literally yelled out.If you haven't read this book I suggest that you try to find it. Apparently it's been turned into a movie, which I'll be interested to see.
    • 4/5
      This dysfunctional family is looking for love in all the wrong places. As the story begins, we think this is just a “normal” dysfunctional family, but as the book progresses, we feel the horror of watching helplessly as the problems of the parents affect the children, who start out shy but hopeful, and with a chance in life….Eliza Naumann is eleven, and in a class “where the unimpressive fifth graders are put.” Then, inexplicably to all, she wins the school spelling bee. Suddenly her father Saul, previously pretty much oblivious to her existence, abandons nurturing her gifted older brother Aaron in order to coach Eliza to the finals. In the process, the wax effigy of a family that these characters have carefully constructed dissolves as they fly, independently and together, too close to the sun.As their worlds fall apart they transmute psychologically into whirling dervishes, needing to exert more and more regulation into the small parts of their worlds they can control. They never figure out that each of them is looking for the same thing, and that being honest and open with each other is their only chance to get it. Discussion: There are so many rich layers to this torte of a book: the secret interior lives kept from one another that are being taken to crazy extremes; the hilarious and frightening way in which each family member's secret behaviors echoes the others’ pyschoses; the power of rituals to bind people; the power of rituals to ward off fear; the power of rituals to take over meaning until no meaning is left – just the rite; the sins (and illnesses) of the fathers (and mothers) being visited upon the children; and hovering above it all, the power of words. Words play a large symbolic role in this story. They are Eliza’s ticket out of her crazy family, but her father Saul, a frustrated Jewish mystic, is determined to transform Eliza’s talent with words into the ability to see God, as instructed by the 13th Century mystic Abraham Abulafia. Aaron, unaware of what his father and sister are doing, also wants desperately to communicate with God, and learns the words from a Hare Krishna sect to help him do it. And it is the search for transcendence as expressed by the word “perfectimundo" that has driven the mother, Miriam, to insanity.Evaluation: Bee Season was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award. The character study of the two young people is masterful; the adults seem "empty,” but perhaps that is only a reflection of who they are: cardboard adults in the improbable position of parenting. They were also children of parents who sapped them of all hope and happiness. This affecting book is emotionally draining. The results of the absence of engaged and caring parenting on four damaged people are heartbreaking.
    • 4/5
      I love this story! A quirky novel about a spelling bee savant, her older brother who is experimenting with the Hari Krishna, a mother who builds _______ out of ______(I won't give this away), and a father who studies the Talmud and longs for the mystic gift. A powerful and bizarre book. I want everyone I know to read this book, now. "Perfectamundo!"