Literary Significance and Reception
Bee Season was well received by critics. Paul Gray (TIME) called it "a winningly eccentric and intriguing first novel." Dwight Garner (The New York Times) called it "a dispassionate, fervidly intelligent book...that comes by its emotion honestly" and described it as Kaaterskill Falls meets American Beauty. It reached number 15 in the New York Times independent fiction bestseller list in July, 2000.
Reviewers have commented on how the book begins on a simple note (girl unexpectedly wins a school contest), and later moves into dark territory (family falls apart). In a 2005 interview at her college alma mater, Goldberg explained her motivation: "I'll tell you how I wrote the book. I did write it very consciously to get darker and stronger as it continues. I wanted it at first to be like this sunny, happy, Reader's Digest kind of read, and to lull people into this sense of complacency and then hit them over the head."
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