Book Thoughts: American Bee

Picked up "American Bee" because I really liked the movie "Spellbound."  Spellbound focused on the 1999 National Spelling Bee.  American Bee focuses on the 2004 and 2005 Bees, with some long digressions about the history of the spelling bee, and the history of spelling.  The book can't entirely decide what it wants to focus on, and the different parts feel a little disjointed -- the sections about the history of the English language, and the history of the spelling bee are okay but Bill Bryson has covered the English language history better in "The Mother Tongue" and "Made in America" (and in fact Bryson is listed in the bibliography here).  There are some chapters about past winners of the Bee, but most of the ones he interviewed are currently employed by the Bee in some capacity, so it didn't seem all that representative, and the selection seemed driven more by ease of access than by which ones would have the most interesting stories.  The best part of the book are the chapters about five 2005 contestants, followed by a description of the 2005 Bee, so we can see how they did... but this is basically only the last third of the book.  These profiled kids are as interesting as the ones in Spellbound, but this book doesn't really live up to the movie.  It's very repetitive -- the author mentions the same facts (Aliya wears her sister's red sweatshirt for good luck, some other girl's parents bought her a horse just for making it to the National Bee, etc) over and over again, and sometimes it feels like paragraphs (about the diversity of the Bee, about the nervousness of the contestants onstage, about the camaraderie between the contestants in the lobby of the hotel) have been lifted from earlier in the book and repasted.  I also got tired of sentences like these: "Apple-cheeked Jack Ausick nails fretum like the word is used constantly in his hometown back in Montana" and "Kerry Close spells otiosity like she knows it cold...."  I know it must be hard to come up with ways to describe people spelling words correctly while varying up the sentences but he used the word "like" so many times, and, no, he didn't spell the word fire like his house was on fire.  He just spelled the word.  Nevertheless, interesting book and it passed the "Did I finish it at home instead of waiting for the next subway ride?" test, which is a standard not that many books meet.

Comments

[Laura]

Hi. I cited your article in my own book review. Thanks, and check it out.