A review by karolinatx
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg

4.0

Bee Season is the story of the unraveling of a family which was clinging together by the barest of threads, with two parents so engrossed in their own obsessions that they listened but never heard. We have Aaron, the older brother, who is consistently bullied at school and feels at peace only at the Jewish temple where his father, Saul, is the cantor. Saul has created a world for himself in his tiny study full of books from which her emerges only to cook dinner for the family as his wife, Miriam, is not the domestic type. Miriam, meanwhile, is haunted by her quest to reach Perfectimundo, a state in which everything is perfectly clean, sterile, and in its correct place. And then there's Eliza, who is tracked as a lower-achieving student in second grade and manages to float through life on a cloud of after-school sitcoms, achieving nothing out of the ordinary until she rockets to the national spelling bee in fifth grade. What follows is the family's gradual collapse, helped along by Aaron's decision to find God in the Hare Krishna faith, Miriam's schizophrenic kleptomania, and Saul's newly-found belief that his daughter can be trained to become a direct link to God based on her talents with letters. Eliza, thrilled at the prospect of her father finally noticed her, plays along until the bitter end when everything snaps. Bee Season is gut-wrenching and by its end, makes the reader feel like he might have descended into the darkness that this family inhabits. Goldberg is a gifted writer, and I look forward to reading more of her work, if perhaps of a more optimistic slant.