Myla Goldberg

I picked up Bee Season not long after I’d finished reading The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, but, as happens, I didn’t read it for a long while later.

It’s a stark story about a young girl who is looking for something to excel at, something to pull her away from a rather tragic, and extremely dysfunctional home life. She finds it in the form of a spelling bee, which she wins on a fluke.

I had a hard time reading this book, because the lack of communication among the family members made me want to throttle them, and because the depression in it is completely unrelenting.