Though it airs quietly on ESPN in early summer, nothing on television can rival the stomach-twisting horror of the National Spelling Bee, an annual rite of passage in which high-strung, over-parented kids are asked to spell words few people in human history have ever spoken. The most memorable winner in recent years was a home-schooled New Yorker named Rebecca Sealfon, who ended the 1997 contest with "euonym" (which, for the curious, is a shrub or small tree that grows in northern temperate regions). Among the sea of other contestants with thick glasses and grinding teeth, Sealfon had a distinguishing tic: Before each letter, she would bury her face in cupped hands, as if privately conjuring a higher force. For Eliza Naumann, the sheepish 9-year-old protagonist in Myla Goldberg's wonderful debut novel Bee Season, spelling is more than just a freakish talent, but an unexpected route to enlightenment. A C student in an overachieving family, Eliza has always been an outcast at school and at home, where her brother, a rabbi in waiting, captures all her father's attention while her mother, a cold and brittle intellectual, keeps her distance. As Eliza breezes through the local, regional, and Pennsylvania state bees, the Naumanns' tenuous equilibrium is thrown off point. Without his father's guidance, her brother is left to experiment in other religions, finally seduced by the robes and chants of a band of Hare Krishnas. Meanwhile, her mother escalates her bizarre secret life as a thief, breaking into houses to collect specific pieces she believes will make her feel whole, such as a ceramic ashtray or a Chinese teakettle. If Bee Season seems at first to be nothing more than a collection of meaningless but compelling quirks, Goldberg reveals patterns in the Naumanns' behavior that point to something far more universal and profound. While it's common for writers or artists to claim that American families like Eliza's suffer from a feeling of spiritual emptiness, Goldberg doesn't take the usual shots at suburbia, the media, or consumerism. In her hermetic universe, God is at the mercy of family dysfunction and dumb luck; at any time, Eliza's connection to her father and the Jewish mystics could be shattered by a single misspelling. As Goldberg expertly demonstrates, the pressures of spelling bees may seem ridiculous, but they're closer to ordinary life than most would care to admit.