The book I read was a Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. This book is the tale of an unremarkable young girl who shifts from an underachiever to an outstanding speller. This book was Myla Goldberg's very first bestselling novel. Myla found inspiration to write this novel after reading an essay in Granta, shortly after she became obsessed with spelling bees. She traveled to Washington for the National Spelling Bee in 1997 where she felt the anxiety and pressures these children were faced with. Though she was never a contestant herself, she sympathized with these children and understood what it felt like to have so much pressure placed upon a child by their parents, living up to their expectations. Myla knew she wanted to be an author ever since she was a child. She went to college at Oberlin, and soon after started a career in writing. She is now in the process of writing her second book and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Jason.
             In Bee Season, the reader is introduced to a gifted family in which every member seems to be an overachiever with the exception of one member, Eliza. The father, Saul, works in a temple as a cantor and scholar. He puts strong emphasis on his children to do well. Eliza's mother, Miriam is a compulsive lawyer always engulfed in her work, that she barely has time for her family. Her older brother Aaron is an intelligent young boy who had recited all his Bar Mitzvah prayers from memory, following in his father's footsteps. Eliza, on the other hand, feels quite out of place within her own family, until she discovers her unremarkable talent for spelling.
             Eliza had never imagined that she would have such a talent. Before, she would rather have sat in front of a television than study or do homework and her father lost faith in her when she wasn't chosen as one of the children for her school's program for gifted children. But once she started competing in these spelling bees at school,...