Bee Season - Review by Halea Coulter

Bee Season
By Myla Goldberg

* * * * 3/4 stars

Eliza is a nobody. She isn't very smart, not very pretty, and not noticed, at least, not until she almost wins the national spelling bee. Aaron an ex-Jew turned Hare Krishna. Miriam is a lawyer, and a kleptomaniac, on a mission to become whole again. And Saul in an ex-hippie Jewish rabbi that loves studying mysticism. So what do these four people have in common? They are one big dysfunctional family.

Saul was a Jewish hippie that did a lot of acid and did a lot of girls, but when he met Miriam, it was the end of that. She enticed him intellectually and she was innocent, she was the one. For Miriam, a very smart, and slightly unstable girl, Saul was an intellectual match and he made her feel a bit more whole. Years later, they have two children, Eliza and Aaron. Aaron is the perfect child, smart like his mother and like his father, poised to become a rabbi. Eliza on the other hand, is a let down; she isn't very smart and shes nothing special. But when suddenly Eliza starts winning spelling bees, she gains the attention of her parents and send the whole family spinning off into directions that made the book very interesting. Saul becomes obsessed with his daughter winning, so he pushes Aaron aside. Aaron feels like he doesn't matter anymore, and strays away from Judaism, and Miriam, like always, she's off in her own little world, it's just worse than before.

This isn't a YA book, it is adult fiction, and I absolutely am in love with it. This is probably one of my favorite books I have ever read, and that is saying something. The family dynamics in this book were very interesting. The relationship between the children and the father changed so rapidly after Eliza started winning spelling bees it was incredible. I felt terrible for Aaron, who starting having issues with his religion around the time his father stopped focusing on him. He turned to a very different type of religion which later in the book created an interesting tension between father and son. There was also the relationship between Saul and Miriam, the mother and father, it was just so strange. Mostly because Miriam was off her rocker, but still, the relationship between them was tense at times and at other times they really just floated around each other. Their sex life was interesting to hear about, mostly because it told us a lot about who Miriam is and how screwed up she really was. Overall, the four main characters were amazing, the book constantly switched from one to another and I always found myself eager to get to the next one. They all had such interesting point of views and story lines, and they were such complete and well developed characters that not only could I not put the book down, it was the only book I've ever read that I consider close to perfection. Between the struggles with faith, and family, and all the terrible things in between, this was an amazing book. The reason I did not give it a perfect five stars is because the ending wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it wasn't bad. The ending to the book was excellent, to me though it just left a few things unresolved, but looking back, they were things that were fine left the way they were. My advice is to read it, Bee Season was amazing.