Bee Season

Last weekend I caught one of the last shows of the 2nd run of the local production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the RCBC theater (Atlantis Productions).

It’s a short musical comedy revolving around a spelling bee, featuring contestants Chip Tolentino,  Leaf Coneybear, Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, Olive Ostrovsky,  Marcy Park, and William Barfee, some guest spellers from the audience, and the adults Rona Lisa Peretti, Vice Principal Panch, and comfort counselor Mitch Mahoney

While Avenue Q is still my favorite,  Spelling Bee was  hilarious too and we were laughing our heads off the whole time. I really loved Leaf Coneybear’s trance-like spelling of names of South American rodents and William  Barfee’s magic foot. The girl characters weren’t as funny though, and sometimes even annoying.

The reason I mention this musical is because it reminded me of the book Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, which I read last year, and realized I haven’t reviewed it here yet.

I found my pristine copy of Bee Season at Book Sale last year for P45. I wasn’t planning on reading it but my aunt said she enjoyed the movie so I decided to give the book a try.

Bee Season is about Eliza Naumann, who has felt out of place in her family her whole life. Her brother Aaron is something of a genius, her mother Miriam is a high-powered attorney, and her dad Saul is a Jewish scholar.

When Eliza wins the class spelling bee, she surprises her family, and most of all, herself. Saul, who has treated Eliza as a virtual stranger all this time,  suddenly gives Eliza the attention she craves and devotes his time to preparing Eliza for the Nationals.

As Saul and Eliza get caught up in their closed-door reviews, the balance shifts in the Naumann family, and the tenuous thread that holds their family together starts to unravel.

On the whole, I liked the spelling bee part of the book.  I liked how Eliza deals with being a nobody in a family of achievers, and how she discovers that she isn’t average after all (much like Leaf Coneybear in Spelling Bee).

I liked how Eliza becomes interested in spelling, in the structure of the words and word origins, and how she sounds out the words in her head before spelling them. I also liked how Eliza dealt with the pressure of joining the competition as she went through the  spelling bee cycles.

I couldn’t really relate to the Jewish aspect of it, as I don’t know much about the religion, much less understand the mysticism of it. It did give me a good insight into Jewish customs and into contemporary Jewish life, and is one of the few non-Inquisition and non-Holocaust books I’ve read that features Judaism.

What I didn’t like, however, was how the spelling bee was such a minor aspect of the book. The book starts out okay, and then somewhere along the line, the domestic drama of this dysfunctional family was so overpowering it drew attention away from the spelling bee, which was the sole attraction of the book for me. Getting through to the end of the book became such an effort; I felt I was being forced into reading something I didn’t sign up for and the plot was spinning wildly out of control, getting more and more unbelievable with each page.

It was confusing and disappointing, which is sad, because I really loved Eliza’s story and wish the book just focused on that, and if I wanted a melodrama I’d have gotten myself an Oprah’s book club selection (ugh).

Okay, enough ranting. I want to end this on a positive note, so here is the Manila cast of Spelling Bee, courtesy of Atlantis Productions, singing the Finale song:

***

My copy: Bee Season, trade paperback

My rating: 2/5 stars for Bee Season. 4/5 stars for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee!