In Myla Goldberg's outstanding first novel, a family is shaken apart by a small but unexpected shift in the prospects of one of its members. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann, an otherwise indifferent student, takes first prize in her school spelling bee, it is as if rays of light have begun to emanate from her head. Teachers regard her with a new fondness; the studious girls begin to save a place for her at lunch. Even Eliza can sense herself changing. She had "often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see."

Eliza's father, Saul, a scholar and cantor, had long since given up expecting sparks of brilliance on her part. While her brother, Aaron, had taken pride in reciting his Bar Mitzvah prayers from memory, she had typically preferred television reruns to homework or reading. This belated evidence of a miraculous talent encourages Saul to reassess his daughter. And after she wins the statewide bee, he begins tutoring her for the national competition, devoting to Eliza the hours he once spent with Aaron. His daughter flowers under his care, eventually coming to look at life "in alphabetical terms." "Consonants are the camels of language," she realizes, "proudly carrying their lingual loads." Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful.... Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. When Saul sees the state of transcendence that she effortlessly achieves in competition, he encourages his daughter to explore the mystical states that have eluded him--the influx of God-knowledge (shefa) described by the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Although Saul has little idea what he has set in motion, "even the sound of Abulafia's name sets off music in her head. A-bu-la-fi-a. It's magic, the open sesame that unblocked the path to her father and then to language itself."

Meanwhile, stunned by his father's defection, Aaron begins a troubling religious quest. Eliza's brainy, compulsive mother is also unmoored by her success. The spelling champion's newfound gift for concentration reminds Miriam of herself as a girl, and she feels a pang for not having seen her daughter more clearly before. But Eliza's clumsy response to Miriam's overtures convinces her mother that she has no real ties to her daughter. This final disappointment precipitates her departure into a stunning secret life. The reader is left wondering what would have happened if the Naumanns' spiritual thirsts had not been set in restless motion. A poignant and exceptionally well crafted tale, Bee Season has a slow beginning but a tour-de-force conclusion. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
An eccentric family falls apart at the seams in an absorbing debut that finds congruencies between the elementary school spelling-bee circuit, Jewish mysticism, Eastern religious cults and compulsive behavior. Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann feels like the dullest resident of a house full of intellectuals--her older brother, Aaron, is an overachiever; her mother, Miriam, is a lawyer; and her father, Saul, is a self-taught scholar and a cantor at the community synagogue. She surprises herself and the rest of the Naumanns when she discovers a rare aptitude for spelling, winning her school and district bees with a surreal surge of mystical insight, in which letters seem to take on a life of their own. Saul shifts his focus from Aaron to Eliza, devoting his afternoons to their practice sessions, while neglected Aaron joins the Hare Krishnas. Seduced by his own inner longings, Saul sees in Eliza the potential to fulfill the teachings of the Kabbalah scholar Abulafia, who taught that enlightenment could be reached through strategic alignments of letters and words. Eliza takes to this new discipline with a desperate, single-minded focus. At the same time, her brilliant but removed mother succumbs to a longtime secret vice and begins a descent into madness. Goldberg's insights into religious devotion, guilt, love, obsessive personalities and family dynamics ring true, and her use of spelling-as-metaphor makes a clever trope in a novel populated by literate scholars and voracious readers. Her quiet wit, balanced by an empathetic understanding of human foibles, animates every page. Although she has a tendency to overexplain, Goldberg's attentive ear makes accounts of fast-paced spelling competitions or descriptions of Miriam's struggles to resist her own compulsions riveting, and her unerring knack for telling details (as when Eliza twitches through a spelling bee in itchy tights) captures a child's perceptions with touching acuity. While coming-of-age stories all bear a certain similarity, Goldberg strikes new ground here, and displays a fresh, distinctive and totally winning voice. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-Eliza and Aaron Naumann are never chosen for school teams and struggle to make friends. Their father, a cantor devoted to the study of Jewish mysticism, spends his days reading ancient Hebrew texts, cooking the meals, and taking care of the family. Their mother is a lawyer and the breadwinner. The parents sleep in separate rooms and barely converse. Saul Naumann hopes that "gifted-and-talented" 16-year-old Aaron will follow in his footsteps and become a scholar. Nine-year-old Eliza is a C student of whom little is expected. However, when she wins her school's spelling bee, things begin to change. After she earns first place in district and area competitions, she becomes the focus of her father's attention. Jealous, Aaron reacts by exploring alternate religions and focuses on the Hare Krishnas, where he feels welcomed and valued. Meanwhile, their mother, a kleptomaniac since childhood, has graduated from shoplifting to breaking and entering. Finally, she is arrested and placed in a mental hospital. As the family unit breaks apart, Aaron finds the courage to tell his father of his new religion, and Eliza declares her independence from her father during the national spelling bee. Teens will identify with these young people as they seek out their own identities while risking the loss of parental approval.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Saul Naumann and his wife, Miriam, appear to have an unremarkable marriage. He works in the temple, and she is a compulsive lawyer. Of their two children, Aaron seems destined to become a rabbi, while Eliza is an underachiever. Suddenly, Eliza demonstrates a talent for spelling, and everyone's life is transformed. After finishing second in a national spelling bee, she becomes her father's pet project. Convinced that she has a gift that will allow her to receive shefa, a concept developed by a Jewish mystic named Abraham Abulafia in 1280, he begins daily study sessions with her that eclipse everything else in their lives. Saul fails to notice Aaron's growing disaffection and clandestine immersion in Hare Krishna. Miriam's behavior also becomes more distant and aberrant. Eventually, a family crisis ensues. First novelist Goldberg's story is one of personal voyages. As each character embarks on an individual quest for personal meaning and fulfillment, the family spirals into chaos. The result is not always compelling, however; too much time is devoted to Eliza's study of words. For larger collections.---Kimberly G. Allen, American Inst. of Architects, Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Beliefnet
With Saul and Eliza walling themselves off in the study, Aaron sneaking off to the Krishna temple, and Miriam sinking deeper into a life of crime, the Naumann family starts to disintegrate under the stress of their individual quests for enlightenment. "Bee Season" is a poetically evocative description of mystical states of mind, but it is also an engaging meditation on the sometimes contradictory nature of mysticism, and its relationship to the everyday life of a family. The foal of the mystic is on the one hand to achieve an unmediated personal communion with the divine, but on the other to lose herself in the oceanic feel of infinite connection. Mystical practice seeks to clear the mind of all the petty distractions of worldly life, yet it does so by boiling down the ineffable processes of cosmic order into a small, radically simplified, even banal set of symbolic objects, words, and rituals. Mysticism seems an intensely private phenomenon, yet in one way or another mystical symbolism is the glue that holds together every community of faith. Eliza's family deals with similar tensions, mediating uneasily the conflicting demands of privacy and community, struggling to preserve a sense of common origins and destiny out of the chaos of individual ambitions and day-to-day crises. (Beliefnet, July 2000)


The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner
Bee Season reads like a spiky, artfully twisted Allegra Goodman novel--it's Kaaterskill Falls meets American Beauty.


From Booklist
There is so much pain in this powerful first novel about a family's unraveling that it often seems on the edge of unbearable. And yet, as we watch nine-year-old Eliza Naumann transform herself from underachiever to spelling prodigy, we endure the pain out of respect for one girl's courage and all-consuming love. Eliza's family is gradually breaking down in front of her: father Saul, whose self-absorbed passion for Jewish mysticism blinds him to the suffering of those closest to him; mother Myriam, whose quest for perfection leads her into kleptomania; and brother Aaron, who rebels against his faith and turns to Hare Krishna. Eliza attempts to put her family back together by an act of will, spelling her way to harmony, with an assist from her father's Kabbalah masters. Goldberg effectively mixes fascinating detail about spelling bees with metaphorical leaps of imagination, producing a novel that works on many levels. There is something of Holden Caulfield in Eliza, the same crazed determination to save her loved ones from themselves. An impressive debut from a remarkably talented writer. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
An impressive debut about a young girl from a brilliant but eccentric family whose special talent earns her a place in the family and finally in the world.Eliza Naumann has never really excelled at anything. In fact, she's always been rather ordinary—to the point where she seems pretty much to disappear amid the other members of her highly accomplished family. Her father Saul is a brilliant scholar, entirely dedicated to the study of Jewish mysticism. He has, in turn, poured all his hopes and dreams for spiritual enlightenment into his sensitive and thoughtful son Aaron, while his wife Miriam, though a lawyer, drifts off into an emotional haze, trying to put meaning into her existence by entering other people's empty houses and stealing small, seemingly insignificant items. Eliza remains invisible and at sea in the midst of this hyper-odd family—until her unknown talent for spelling is surprisingly unearthed. After having been more or less ignored for all of her nine years, she wins the attention of her schoolmates, teachers, and, most important, of her father, who responds not so much because of the acclaim Eliza is beginning to garner, but because he suddenly sees in her a disciple, someone who, through the use of letters, words, language, can be used as a conduit to God. Her broth Aaron, meanwhile, having always been the golden child but now left to his own devices, begins searching for enlightenment through other religions, eventually settling on Hare Krishna. And so, just as Eliza is finding her way in life, her family starts to unravel, fall away, and drift farther and farther apart.Goldberg is a gifted writer, but her style—delivered in a detached, almost clinical prose that gives the feeling of fable or dream—holds the reader at a distance and keeps her characters from ever quite coming into the third dimension. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Does adolescent insecurity, Jewish mysticism, the Hare Krishnas, and obsessive-compulsive disorder seem like a lot to pack into a first novel? Myla Goldberg tackles all that and more in a seamless, compelling narrative in Bee Season. Not bees as in honey, but bees as in S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G. The kind you either dreaded or loved as a child.

When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann finds out she has an unusual talent for spelling, she is utterly confounded. The long-time disappointment in her highly intelligent family, Eliza has grown accustomed to her role as under-performer. Her father Saul spends his evenings immersed in Jewish mystical studies; her mother Miriam, a successful lawyer and compulsive housekeeper, maintains a safe emotional distance from her family; and her brother Aaron usurps what little time Saul has to offer in the form of spiritual instruction in his father's hallowed study.

Initially very much alone in this quirky family, Eliza becomes the center of attention when she wins the regional spelling bee and goes on to face the nationals. Her father quickly jettisons Aaron's spiritual education in favor of training Eliza to win, and her mother spends more and more time at the office. Left to his own devices, Aaron is drawn into an eastern religious cult (the Hare Krishnas) and begins to lie about his whereabouts while Miriam's life begins to spin out of her careful control.

With impeccable imagery, Goldberg's extraordinary skill brings the trials of children's competition in the classroom, onstage, and within one's own family to brilliant, blinding light and details the unraveling of one family in just a few, untended months. (Spring 2000 Selection)

The Barnes & Noble Review

Myla Goldberg sketches character in quick, thick strokes. In a few strong lines, she portrays a character's formative miseries, showing how childhood's tiny embarrassments can cause lasting defects. Singly, her characters seem broken, but together they form something more than whole. Each has his or her own roiling inner world; each is fractured and driven by need. In her debut novel, Bee Season, Goldberg pieces these broken characters together in a gorgeous literary mosaic of human longing.

Bee Season chronicles one year in the Naumann family. The Naumanns are damaged but roughly functional. Saul, the family patriarch, spends his days studying kabbalistic texts in his search for a spiritual connection with his God. Mother Miriam, whose parents indulged her intellectually and emotionally, insists upon keeping her house as rigidly segmented as her mind. Their children, Aaron and Eliza, simply fight for affection. Each is defective, but together they form a working unit. Saul finds solace in teaching Aaron Hebrew, while Aaron basks in the glow of his father's attention. Miriam supports the household and keeps it clean. And Eliza subsists on the emotional crumbs from the family table.

But when little Eliza wins her local spelling bee—and thus steals Saul's attention from Aaron—the Naumann family begins to break apart. Each member undertakes a solitary quest to find fulfillment: Eliza finds herself playing mystical alphabet games in an effort to keep her newfound prominence in the family. Aaron chants odd prayers, trying to replace his father's friendship and protection, while Miriam heists knickknacks to finish the frayed edges of her life. Alone, each Naumann hunts for salvation in the physical world, shoring up fragments against a ruin that's already come.

Goldberg renders the Naumanns with infinite patience and care. She develops a complete inner world for each one and fits those worlds together artfully, creating a family portrait that is at once levelheaded and compassionate. In the manner of Jane Smiley or Frederick Busch, Goldberg imagines complex character dynamics matter-of-factly, as if with a shrug. Her wisdom refrains from judgment. Goldberg can lace Bee Season with clear-eyed observations about her characters without ever seeming smarmy or bitter; somehow, she enables readers to see though characters and inside them at the same time. Even Eliza's creepy classmates seem foolishly likable: "Sinna has blue contact lenses and big boobs. Everyone knows her eyes are fake because they were brown the year before, but Sinna insists that a lot of people's eyes change when they go through puberty." Goldberg's characters are ridiculous and understandable—in a word, human.

But Bee Season doesn't only create rich, real characters; it opens questions that resonate through each character's life. How do family members belong to one another? How are family and spirituality related? Do we seek God for emotional reasons? In Goldberg's story, people change; each character's shifting thoughts reflect on another's, creating a kaleidoscope of feelings instead of a singular moral platitude. When Aaron stumbles upstairs to his father's study looking for comfort but finds Saul and Eliza privately spelling over their dictionary instead, we feel the confused emotion of every character: Aaron, embarrassed by his need for affection; Eliza, guilty and delighted at her importance; and Saul, blind to everything but the moment's spiritual possibilities.

By allowing her characters and their quirky feelings to reflect one another, Goldberg shows readers how a family can both damage and nurture its members. More importantly, she affords her readers a glimpse of the complex links between her characters' inner worlds. In this rich and funny novel, every broken character fits into a pattern that is dazzling and complete.

Jesse Gale is a writer living in Los Angeles.

ANNOTATION

Finalist in Frankfurt eBook Award 2000, for Best Fiction work originally published in print and converted to eBook form.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Scott Tobias - Onion AV Club

While it's common for writers or artists to claim that American families like Eliza's suffer from a feeling of spiritual emptiness, Goldberg doesn't take the usual shots at suburbia, the media, or consumerism. In her hermetic universe, God is at the mercy of family dysfunction and dumb luck; at any time, Eliza's connection to her father and the Jewish mystics could be shattered by a single misspelling. As Goldberg expertly demonstrates, the pressures of spelling bees may seem ridiculous, but they're closer to ordinary life than most would care to admit.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

This "intense and enjoyable" debut novel filled with "interesting characters" is a bittersweet coming-of-age story in which a girl with an extraordinary talent for spelling examines the unraveling fabric of a family, with a startling outcome. "A gem of a book." "This book is A-W-E-S-O-M-E and captivating." "Two thumbs up."

Publishers Weekly

An eccentric family falls apart at the seams in an absorbing debut that finds congruencies between the elementary school spelling-bee circuit, Jewish mysticism, Eastern religious cults and compulsive behavior. Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann feels like the dullest resident of a house full of intellectuals--her older brother, Aaron, is an overachiever; her mother, Miriam, is a lawyer; and her father, Saul, is a self-taught scholar and a cantor at the community synagogue. She surprises herself and the rest of the Naumanns when she discovers a rare aptitude for spelling, winning her school and district bees with a surreal surge of mystical insight, in which letters seem to take on a life of their own. Saul shifts his focus from Aaron to Eliza, devoting his afternoons to their practice sessions, while neglected Aaron joins the Hare Krishnas. Seduced by his own inner longings, Saul sees in Eliza the potential to fulfill the teachings of the Kabbalah scholar Abulafia, who taught that enlightenment could be reached through strategic alignments of letters and words. Eliza takes to this new discipline with a desperate, single-minded focus. At the same time, her brilliant but removed mother succumbs to a longtime secret vice and begins a descent into madness. Goldberg's insights into religious devotion, guilt, love, obsessive personalities and family dynamics ring true, and her use of spelling-as-metaphor makes a clever trope in a novel populated by literate scholars and voracious readers. Her quiet wit, balanced by an empathetic understanding of human foibles, animates every page. Although she has a tendency to overexplain, Goldberg's attentive ear makes accounts of fast-paced spelling competitions or descriptions of Miriam's struggles to resist her own compulsions riveting, and her unerring knack for telling details (as when Eliza twitches through a spelling bee in itchy tights) captures a child's perceptions with touching acuity. While coming-of-age stories all bear a certain similarity, Goldberg strikes new ground here, and displays a fresh, distinctive and totally winning voice. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Saul Naumann and his wife, Miriam, appear to have an unremarkable marriage. He works in the temple, and she is a compulsive lawyer. Of their two children, Aaron seems destined to become a rabbi, while Eliza is an underachiever. Suddenly, Eliza demonstrates a talent for spelling, and everyone's life is transformed. After finishing second in a national spelling bee, she becomes her father's pet project. Convinced that she has a gift that will allow her to receive shefa, a concept developed by a Jewish mystic named Abraham Abulafia in 1280, he begins daily study sessions with her that eclipse everything else in their lives. Saul fails to notice Aaron's growing disaffection and clandestine immersion in Hare Krishna. Miriam's behavior also becomes more distant and aberrant. Eventually, a family crisis ensues. First novelist Goldberg's story is one of personal voyages. As each character embarks on an individual quest for personal meaning and fulfillment, the family spirals into chaos. The result is not always compelling, however; too much time is devoted to Eliza's study of words. For larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/00.]--Kimberly G. Allen, American Inst. of Architects, Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

School Library Journal

YA-Eliza and Aaron Naumann are never chosen for school teams and struggle to make friends. Their father, a cantor devoted to the study of Jewish mysticism, spends his days reading ancient Hebrew texts, cooking the meals, and taking care of the family. Their mother is a lawyer and the breadwinner. The parents sleep in separate rooms and barely converse. Saul Naumann hopes that "gifted-and-talented" 16-year-old Aaron will follow in his footsteps and become a scholar. Nine-year-old Eliza is a C student of whom little is expected. However, when she wins her school's spelling bee, things begin to change. After she earns first place in district and area competitions, she becomes the focus of her father's attention. Jealous, Aaron reacts by exploring alternate religions and focuses on the Hare Krishnas, where he feels welcomed and valued. Meanwhile, their mother, a kleptomaniac since childhood, has graduated from shoplifting to breaking and entering. Finally, she is arrested and placed in a mental hospital. As the family unit breaks apart, Aaron finds the courage to tell his father of his new religion, and Eliza declares her independence from her father during the national spelling bee. Teens will identify with these young people as they seek out their own identities while risking the loss of parental approval.-Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Bee Season is a profound delight, an amazement, a beauty, and is, I hope, a book of the longest of seasons. — Jane Hamilton