Bee Season Review: I Signed Up for a Spelling Bee. I Accidentally Joined a Mystical Cult. (2.5⭐)
I have a confession.
I am weirdly fascinated by spelling bees. 🐝
I learned English as a second language in high school, so I never had the chance to compete in one. Ironically, spelling has always come naturally to me. I've often wondered whether, if I'd grown up in America, I would've been one of those kids spending months memorizing obscure dictionary words while my parents questioned every life choice that led us there.
I've also watched the documentary Spellbound, which, despite being about children spelling words, somehow had me on the edge of my seat. It shouldn't be that exciting...and yet it absolutely is.
So when I found Bee Season, I thought I'd discovered the perfect novel.
Competitive spelling.
Gifted kid.
Family drama.
Sign me up.
Well...
About half of that is true.
The spelling bee portions were fantastic. The rest of the novel slowly transformed into something I was completely unprepared for. It became stranger...and stranger...and somehow even stranger than that. By the time I reached the ending, I wasn't frustrated so much as sitting there wondering, "...what exactly did I just read?"
Rating: 2.5⭐
📖 Quick Facts
Author: Myla Goldberg
Published: 2000
Genre: Literary Fiction
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
Mental illness
Emotional neglect
Dysfunctional family
Bullying
Religious obsession
Cult involvement
Sexual content
Sexual coercion within marriage
Theft
Animal attack
Institutionalization
Pregnancy loss (mentioned)
🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨
This review contains FULL spoilers, including the ending.
📝 Plot Summary
The novel follows Eliza Naumann, an ordinary eleven-year-old girl who has spent most of her life being overlooked.
Her older brother Aaron is the impressive child. He's intelligent, deeply involved in Judaism, and clearly their father Saul's favorite. Saul is a cantor whose true obsession isn't music but Jewish mysticism, particularly the teachings of the medieval Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.
Their mother Miriam appears perfectly ordinary on the surface. She's supposedly a successful lawyer, keeps the house immaculate, and mostly stays in the background. She seems a little emotionally distant, but nothing immediately raises alarm bells.
Then Eliza unexpectedly wins her classroom spelling bee.
Nobody—including Eliza herself—expects it.
She continues winning.
School.
District.
Regional.
Before long she's headed to the National Spelling Bee.
These chapters were, without question, my favorite part of the book. Goldberg captures the excitement of competition beautifully. Every difficult word raises the stakes, and I found myself rooting for Eliza every step of the way.
Unlike many spelling champions, Eliza doesn't rely on endless memorization.
Instead, she simply sees words.
Letters seem to arrange themselves in her mind almost instinctively, allowing her to spell words she's never encountered before.
Her unexpected talent also earns something she's never really had before:
Her father's attention.
Saul begins coaching her, but as Eliza continues spelling impossible words correctly through intuition alone, he starts believing her gift isn't simply intelligence.
He becomes convinced it's spiritual.
To Saul, language is sacred, and he begins interpreting Eliza's ability as evidence that she possesses a unique connection to God.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family slowly starts falling apart.
Aaron watches his father's attention shift almost entirely to Eliza. Feeling abandoned, he begins questioning the faith that once defined his entire identity. His spiritual search eventually leads him to the Hare Krishna movement, where he finds a new sense of belonging.
Miriam, meanwhile, grows increasingly strange.
She spends nights obsessively cleaning.
She seems detached from everyone around her.
She has habits that feel...off...although neither the family nor the reader fully understands why.
Eventually Eliza reaches the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
Saul encourages her to stop relying solely on logic and instead trust the mystical techniques he's begun teaching her.
She survives the first day.
On the second day, however, she's eliminated after misspelling the word "duvetyn."
Oddly, this doesn't shake Saul's beliefs.
It strengthens them.
Instead of accepting that Eliza simply lost, Saul concludes she hasn't yet reached her full spiritual potential. He abandons ordinary spelling practice almost entirely and begins immersing her in increasingly elaborate Kabbalistic exercises. Winning next year's National Spelling Bee, he believes, will be proof that she has achieved direct communion with God.
While Saul becomes more obsessed than ever, the rest of the family's hidden problems finally explode into the open.
Aaron grows even more committed to Hare Krishna and eventually runs away to live at a temple.
Miriam's increasingly bizarre behavior also reaches a breaking point when she's caught breaking into a stranger's home.
Only then does the truth emerge.
For years, Miriam has secretly been stealing thousands of seemingly insignificant objects from houses, offices, and public places.
The police discover an enormous storage unit filled with these stolen items, all carefully arranged into intricate kaleidoscopic patterns. She believes she's collecting scattered pieces of the world in an unconscious attempt to make herself feel complete.
Saul receives another devastating surprise when he learns Miriam hasn't actually practiced law in over a decade, despite pretending to leave for work every day.
She is committed to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.
By this point, Saul has essentially lost his wife and his son.
Only Eliza remains.
His obsession with her spiritual destiny becomes even stronger.
🎭 Ending Explained
Left largely alone, Eliza secretly begins reading Saul's advanced Kabbalistic texts.
Eventually she performs one of Abulafia's complex mystical rituals by herself, chanting sacred combinations of letters for hours.
The experience becomes physically overwhelming.
She experiences an intense vision of an ever-changing divine face that seems to encompass everything around her.
Whether this vision is genuinely supernatural or simply the result of psychological exhaustion is never explained. Goldberg deliberately leaves it open to interpretation.
Afterward, Eliza no longer seems excited about spelling—or about fulfilling her father's expectations.
Aaron eventually returns home from the Hare Krishna temple, although his relationship with Saul remains strained.
Miriam stays institutionalized.
The family isn't magically repaired.
Everyone has simply reached an uneasy acceptance of where they now stand.
When the next spelling bee season begins, Saul eagerly attends Eliza's classroom competition, convinced this will be the beginning of her return to greatness.
Instead, Eliza is given the word origami.
She knows exactly how to spell it.
She intentionally spells it with a Y.
Just like that...
She's eliminated.
It's a deliberate act of rebellion.
By intentionally losing, Eliza rejects both the crushing pressure of competitive spelling and her father's increasingly unhealthy belief that she's some sort of mystical chosen one.
It's the first truly independent decision she makes for herself.
And that's where the novel ends.
💭 My Thoughts
This book completely blindsided me.
If someone had honestly described it beforehand as:
"A literary novel about Jewish mysticism, mental illness, religious identity, obsessive parenting, kleptomania, Hare Krishna, and one little girl who happens to be good at spelling..."
...I would've known what I was getting into.
Instead, I expected the spelling bee to be the heart of the novel.
It really isn't.
The spelling bee is more like the catalyst that sets everything else in motion.
Now, to be fair, I actually found the first half fascinating.
Every chapter introduced another strange family dynamic, and I kept thinking, "This is weird...but I'm interested."
Unfortunately, somewhere around the midpoint, "interesting weird" gradually became "I'm not entirely sure what the author is trying to say anymore."
The mystical elements become increasingly abstract.
Characters drift farther and farther from reality.
The symbolism starts taking priority over the story.
By the end, I understood what happened.
I'm just not convinced it all added up to a satisfying novel.
I kept waiting for everything to click into place.
It never quite did.
The irony is that my favorite scenes—the spelling bee competitions—made up only a small portion of the book.
Every time Eliza stepped onto a stage, I was completely invested.
Every time we returned to pages and pages of mystical letter permutations and spiritual theories, my enthusiasm faded a little.
I don't mind literary fiction that leaves questions unanswered.
I just need to feel like the emotional journey lands.
For me, this one never quite did.
✅ What I Liked
📖 The spelling bee competitions were genuinely exciting.
🐝 Eliza is an easy character to root for.
🧩 Miriam's secret was one of the novel's strongest reveals.
✍️ Goldberg's writing is beautiful and easy to read.
💔 The portrayal of emotional neglect within a family feels authentic.
❌ What Didn't Work for Me
😕 The novel gradually abandons the premise that initially hooked me.
📚 The heavy focus on Kabbalistic mysticism eventually became overwhelming.
🤔 The symbolism often overshadowed the story.
💭 The ending left me appreciating the ideas more than the actual reading experience.
⭐ Final Thoughts
I completely understand why Bee Season has developed such a loyal following.
If you enjoy literary fiction packed with symbolism, ambiguity, religion, philosophy, and books that invite endless interpretation, there's probably a lot here to admire.
But if you're picking this up because you're excited to read about competitive spelling bees...
Temper your expectations.
The bees are only one small piece of a much larger—and much stranger—story.
Final Rating: 2.5⭐
📚 If You Enjoyed Bee Season...
If you liked the gifted-child aspect or literary family dramas, I'd recommend:
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Have you read Bee Season? I'd genuinely love to know whether the ending worked for you...because I finished the book feeling like I accidentally wandered into an advanced theology seminar when all I wanted was a spelling bee. 😂🐝
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