Story Calling

If I don't finish this novel by ten in the morning I will be renting it at 20 cents per day until I return it. So excuse me if I kinda blow off a serious post today. The headache preventing me from reading all day just lifted and Myla Goldberg's story is calling to me stronger than anything else right now.

This story speaks to me on so many levels. It is a coming of age story which is one of my favorite types of story. It is also the story of a young girl with a love for words that morphs into a talent for winning spelling bees. But it also address family dynamics and spiritual quests and the messy mud-pie muddle our miss-perceptions of one another's meanings can make of relationships.

All four members of the family of 11 year old Eliza are on individual spiritual quests whether for meaning, encounters with the sacred or a gathering of the broken shards of the psyche into wholeness. And yet they just keep bumping up against one another like billiard balls, knocking each other into unintended trajectories. The irony is that all of the spiritual traditions, even Kabbalah the Jewish mysticism that Eliza's father is fascinated with, emphasize that the role of relationship is paramount, that it is in relationships that we encounter the sacred.

I'm only half way through Bee Season but I'm confident that the story is going to fulfill its promises. So I'm not afraid to say: you gotta read this book!