A month or so ago, I bought the book Bee Season, partly for sentimental reasons. The story per the blurb was of a girl who entered the Spelling Bee contest so that days leading to the contest are described -- how she practiced, how she earned the chance to represent her school and district, how her dad trained her. I thought it interesting at the start as her father taught her how to think of letters, how vowels sounded relative to consonants, etc. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the story takes on too many layers. Aside from focusing on the spelling bee girl, it talks of her highly dysfunctional family, particularly her mom who has the propensity to steal although they are well of enough. It also speaks of her brother and his religion angst and her father who is a character of sorts, likewise.
Perhaps if the blurb on the back cover were not so written, I wouldn't have expected too much from the book. Makes me wonder therefore if, as I read or saw somewhere, book reviewers do not read the book page for page but merely breeze through it, hence the deception cum inaccuracy of their reviews.
Though the book is but 322 pages, it has given me no compelling reason to finish it pronto. If and when I decide to finish reading it, hopefully soon, my motivation is this: so I can go read other books. Like a novel by Murakami, for example, which my son read for English class. We have since bought 3 other books of the Japanese author.
Posts
1 comment:
How can I ever forget that you were once a Spelling Bee?! Ha ha ha! I loooove telling and retelling my nephews and nieces (see? I spelled that correctly!) about how the two of us were left in the final round, and when they gave us the tie-breaker, (the word was NIECE!), and I started to spell N...E... you whispered behind me N-I-E!
You know, I bought the VCD of Bee Season many many years ago for probably the same reason why you bought it.
Here's another anecdote: when one of my (yours, too!) nephews had difficulty in his spelling classes (watched too much TV, that's why!), my brother/your cousin personally tutored him in reading and spelling. That improved his grades and awakened his interest in reading.
Post a Comment