Sometimes, things just kind of start to come together in front of your eyes. Maybe it’s not super conscious- it’s a bunch of things that just sort of build up until they become something more tangible and you can start to see purpose in their togetherness.
Other times, things just kind of start to unravel in front of your eyes. Maybe it’s not super within your control- it’s a bunch of things that just sort of start to fall apart until suddenly everything is different than how it started and it’s hard to make sense of it all.
Bee Season offers both emotions- one seamlessly becomes the other and you first of all don’t realize how far into the unraveling you are until you’re entrenched, but you also don’t realize how relatively nice it was when everything was put together.
The beginning of the book is all about structure, often to a frustrating degree. The book is mainly focused on the Naumann family, with some other characters thrown in there for good measure and plot movement. Each member of the family has his or her rightful place and you can sense (and are told) that it’s exactly where they’ve been for just about their entire collective lives. No one doubts, no one falters, no one questions (even though that’s exactly what I understand Judaism to be about).
And then something snaps- it’s a gradual snapping, but as the reader, it’s impossible to know that except in hindsight. The rest of the book is about reeling from the aftershock of a huge change in a set of lives. It’s a good look into the potential varying responses to bending things until they break.
I felt invested in the characters, even at their most frustrating. The last 20 percent of the book made me anxious for them- I wanted to know how things ended up and I wanted everyone to be okay. I’ll be questioning for a little while whether or not they are, but the book proves that even in times of complacency or chaos, there might be elements of the other in the background.
(A search for an image shows that this book is now also a movie and no one looks like I imagined them- Richard Gere as Saul means my mother will definitely love it though!)
You’ll like this if: you like stories that overlap into a plot that reveals itself gradually and then comes crashing down at once.
Happy reading!
carlyreads 