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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender (Goodreads Author)

3.14 of 5 stars 3.14 · rating details · 27,842 ratings · 6,498 reviews

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her...more

Kindle Edition, 294 pages

Published June 26th 2010 by Doubleday (first published June 1st 2010)

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Oct 12, 2012 Miki rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: never-read-again

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Okay - I realize I'm not deep, and I can very seldom get the hidden meaning in what I read, but this is ridiculous. I can't find a single reason why anyone would read this book.

SPOILER * SPOILER * SPOILER * SPOILER

The story centers on Rose, a young girl who learns that she can taste the emotions of people in the food they cook. After some time, she can taste the "layers" in the food all the way back to where it was produced, for example, she can trace eggs - by their taste - to the actual county...more

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Dec 12, 2011 Gavin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS****

Every so often a book comes along that creates a divisive turmoil in me. Sometimes these books make me angry; sometimes they make me shake my head in wonder as to why exactly I read it; sometimes it takes months for me to really understand just how impactful the book was to me, which helps clear some of the fog or guilt or happiness or sadness or whatever I felt while reading it. THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE is such a book. Let me first say that this...more ****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS****

Every so often a book comes along that creates a divisive turmoil in me. Sometimes these books make me angry; sometimes they make me shake my head in wonder as to why exactly I read it; sometimes it takes months for me to really understand just how impactful the book was to me, which helps clear some of the fog or guilt or happiness or sadness or whatever I felt while reading it. THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE is such a book. Let me first say that this is my first Aimee Bender experience, and though I will rant and rave about certain issues I had with the book, I will more than likely seek out other works by her.

Ultimately, this novel is about family, and the peccadilloes and quirky aspects of being a part of a family. Normally, I love books like these. In some way they make me feel as if my family was “normal.”

Rose Edelstein receives on her ninth birthday a gift that is more akin to a curse: she is given the ability to taste what people feel through whatever food they have created. Loneliness. Despair. Happiness. Sadness. Guilt. Hate. Anger. Embarrassment. Preoccupation. Whatever the person was feeling comes alive on her taste buds. At first, Rose finds this newly found talent as a burdensome weight, who wouldn’t at nine years old? She tries to tell her brother, Joseph, a neurotic science obsessed teenager, but gets nowhere in the process. (We’ll discuss Joseph in a few minutes.) What she does find in telling Joseph is a refuge in Joseph’s best friend George, an equally neurotic science obsessed teenager, but one that is routed firmly in reality. Together, Rose and George, begin to test her abilities by tasting different cookies made at a bakery. This part of the book was fun. I was eager to know just how Rose’s tasting abilities were taking shape and what she would do with her powers.

Ms. Bender had different ideas for me. About this time in the narrative, different details about Rose’s mother and father begin to take shape. Her father has an overpowering fear of hospitals. Her mother begins an affair with a guy named Larry. These aspects are touched upon routinely within the narrative, but they are never fully given the pages needed (in my opinion) to fully blossom. Simple one-line explanations are tacked on as if in an afterthought, which detracts from what the real storyline seems to be: Why exactly does Rose feel that her family is crumbling like one of the dry chocolate-chip cookies she ate at the bakery? (Again, we’ll come back to this in a moment.)

Life continues for Rose and her family. Her power continues to grow. During this time I found the writing to be beautiful, full of descriptive language that could not only be seen, but could be touched and smelled and, yes, even tasted. Through these vivid descriptions, I was able to really empathize with Rose and the others…then the wheels came off. Chaos ensued. Confusion reigned. Absurdity elevated its position of court jester to king.

I read other reviews that stated this novel was a version of magical realism. I cannot disagree enough about this assertion. Magical realism is something more than the absurd mixing with reality. It is a powerful style that helps illuminate or criticize certain aspects of society. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes magical realism. Salman Rushdie writes magical realism. Isabel Allende writes magical realism. Jorge Borges wrote magical realism. Even Toni Morrison writes in magical realism. Having a character turn into a chair, one that can taste people’s feelings, and another that can smell what a person is like IS NOT MAGICAL REALISM. This is merely a great example of surrealism. Or, better yet, science fiction. Yes, I said science fiction. If science fiction doesn’t float your boat, then choose the word fantasy. But I am getting off track here. My real problem is this: A chair? That is all that Aimee Bender could come up with? Joseph is so depressed, so isolated because of his faux-romantic relationship with science that he manipulates his body into a piece of furniture? This device, to me, seemed too contrived because of Rose’s mother’s new hobby of woodworking. And the fact that we, the readers, are never given any insight as to why Joseph felt the overpowering need to turn into a piece of furniture gives his “power” a silly cartoonish quality.

But the vagueness of Aimee Bender doesn’t stop there. Why does the affair take place? There is nothing to suggest as to why this happens. Rose’s father seems to be a typical, hard-working father. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t beat his family. He might be labeled as emotionally distant, but that would only be conjecture on the part of the reader. If anything, he seems to be defeated by his wife. She is the one that seems to have all the issues. She has problems with committing to a career. She seems to be constantly living in a world of daydreams and nostalgia. Still, these assumptions on my part, do not qualify the affair. I think an action of this kind needs to be explained, dissected, poured over within pages, not single sentence add-ons that satisfy the objective of not having any loose ends.

What it comes down to for me is: This book seemed unfinished. Thought about, but never fully realized. Rushed. Perhaps I am wrong about all this. Perhaps I missed the point. I’m willing to concede that. But I am not willing to concede the fact that there was a very interesting story within these pages that was given a very abrupt, almost casual execution.

But as I said, time will tell for this novel. Perhaps I’ll amend my thoughts once time has given me the chance to ruminate, order, or even change them.

RECOMMENDED (with reservations)
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Dec 18, 2012 Jennie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary_fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The best thing about this book is the cover. I looked at it quite a few times before I realized the shadow wasn't reflecting the cake, but a girl, I'm guessing the narrator, Rose.

Upon first glance and the reading of the synopsis, I'm reminded of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood which I haven't read in years and would like to skim through again.

And it was all downhill from there. I can't decide if I should go into detail here about how much I disliked this book or not. I probably should becaus...more The best thing about this book is the cover. I looked at it quite a few times before I realized the shadow wasn't reflecting the cake, but a girl, I'm guessing the narrator, Rose.

Upon first glance and the reading of the synopsis, I'm reminded of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood which I haven't read in years and would like to skim through again.

And it was all downhill from there. I can't decide if I should go into detail here about how much I disliked this book or not. I probably should because this book is the first read for a new book club I'm in and I'm worried about sounding like a negative nelly when I first meet these new people. I could get out all my bad feelings here. But then part of me was thinking, why am I worrying, why can't I go and just be totally honest about how I feel about this book.

Rose has the weirdest eating disorder I've ever heard of: she can taste the feelings and true emotions of the person who prepared her food, as well as those who have handled the ingredients. One of the things I asked myself immediately was, why doesn't she cook her own food? I forgot about this question until I reached the end of the book where she does finally cook and attempt to eat her own food. It's hard for her, I guess she was facing her true self? I felt like there were so many missed opportunities about the food world. There are a few mentions of Rose tasting the exhaustion of strawberry pickers, etc. but no attempt to address the vast food problems we face today like fruit pickers, factory farms, and processed food.

This book has virtually no setting; I have never missed setting so much in a book. And listing street names does not count as describing a setting. I have no idea what time period this was supposed to take place in! I tried to not let it bug me, but it did. I guess I focused on it so much because this story was as dry as an overcooked piece of lemon cake. It was obviously contemporary, but since there is not a single mention of cell phones, and there are home phones and pay phones, my guess is it could be the 80s or 90s.

I felt like so much of this novel was trying to be weird, just for the sake of being weird. There were several things that I found intriguing: the door installed in Joseph's bedroom, the discarded objects sent to Rose's family from her grandmother, Rose's mother's affair with Larry, Rose's father who detested hospitals so much that he missed out on the birth of both his children. But I felt like these things were introduced and then dropped, or not enough attention was paid to them in general they were never fully realized. I took notes in the margins in case I have to point to specific examples at book club and I found myself thinking and writing "?" over and over. There were whole passages that I just did not understand. I kept feeling like I was missing something.

Speaking of missing things, let's talk about quotation marks. Cormac McCarthy can write without quotation marks, but Aimee Bender, you are no Cormac McCarthy. I like to think that I have a progressive view of punctuation usage, but it's all over for me if your writing is not clear and I have to read many sentences over and over just to comprehend them. Most of the time I was okay with it, but there were enough times that I wasn't, that I feel it's necessary to mention it here.

Okay, and the worst part: Joseph turns into furniture!?!? I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Rose's affliction is almost believable (especially when we learn that her paternal grandfather suffered from a similar disorder), but turning...into...furniture? UGHHHH!

Normally I would have stopped reading this book a long time ago, but it's for book club and, honestly, I kept hoping it would get better, but it never did. I literally threw this book across the bed when I finished reading it.

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Feb 27, 2011 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library-books, food, weird, fiction

Nine-year-old Rose Edelstein discovers her “gift” when she takes a bite out of her mother’s lemon cake. This gift is more of a curse, as Rose becomes privy to her mother’s emotional turmoil that is masked by her cheerful and outgoing personality.

This quirky novel is certainly not for everyone, and I wasn’t quite sure it was for me either, but I quickly got sucked into Rose’s life as she discovers family secrets and learns more about herself. When the emotions get too overwhelming for her, Rose r...more

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Dec 05, 2010 Audrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jun 27, 2011 Kelly rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: kindle, depressing, fiction, lit, surrealism, want-those-hours-back

You know what this book is? It's Chinese food. As soon as it's brought up you start salivating, almost tasting how delicious each morsel is going to be. The minute you dive in, your body humming with anticipation, that first bite is everything you hoped it would be. But, after awhile, the bites become more forceful, the taste more dull and average, ending with a full belly, but still not feeling full. And the minute you put your fork down and give in to your limit, you know in half an hour you'r...more

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Apr 22, 2011 Kelly rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This plot was built on an interesting premise - the protagonist could taste every preparational element that went into the food she ate, including the undetected, subconscious emotions of the people who handled it. But this brings pain on the protagonist, as she seems to find only one or two human beings, throughout the course of her young life, who do not possess a divided emotional self that is racked with pain or frustration that permeate the food they make(query whether that is an ultra-, or...more This plot was built on an interesting premise - the protagonist could taste every preparational element that went into the food she ate, including the undetected, subconscious emotions of the people who handled it. But this brings pain on the protagonist, as she seems to find only one or two human beings, throughout the course of her young life, who do not possess a divided emotional self that is racked with pain or frustration that permeate the food they make(query whether that is an ultra-, or un-realistic portrayal of the emotional lives of American individuals). In exchange for this pain, which physically crumples the protagonist at one point, I'd expect the author to give us some sort of payoff - perhaps some insight. But instead we trade the rest of the world's one-dimensional perspective of the mother for the protagonist's equally un-enlightening two-dimensional understanding of her mother as cheerful on the surface, and "lost" underneath. Ok, her mother is "lost." What next for her? For us? Why is she lost? How should we reconcile that with her cheerful exterior? Is there any hope that she can unify her two selves?

I could also have done without the family of people with weird superpowers - I thought her brother's "ability" to "become" or "vanish into" inanimate objects was just plain deeply creepy, and were we supposed to think that her father could heal the sick, but refused to? Also, what a weird choice to have her grandfather walk around with a "strap" over his nose. Couldn't it have been a familiar implement, like a handkerchief or a scarf, though usued unusually? Or maybe he grew his mustache out?

Finally, I thought the real potential of the story was left largely untapped. At the very end, after years of alternate emotional suffering and factory-made junkfood, the protagonist actually (finally!) begins to make her own food. And it tastes like a factory, because she doesn't know herself, probably because her own emotions are as hidden from her as everyone else's she's been tasting all these years are from their conscious selves. Here's a bit of intrigue, then. The idea that we don't know ourselves, and we have to work to do that, and that knowing ourselves holds some sort of fulfillment and comfort, was, I thought, the best idea of the book. But the character doesn't get there until the very end of the story we read, and the cover closes just as she's beginning to possibly learn to do that - and after her supremely creepy brother has promised to only vanish into one chair, which she will keep in the closet, which I'm sure is symbolic of something too dark and sad to bother with. C'mon, Ms. Bender - you've used some strange, lawless science fiction to hold quite the mirror up to ordinary humanity, here - now where is our potential? What promise is there in life, in us? Just that we all learn to quietly cope with this difficult world, and carve out a careful closet for ourselves, instead of completely withdrawing from it? ...Really?

Ugh. I'm glad to be leaving this one behind. (less)

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Feb 09, 2013 Erika Gill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure I have it in me to go into a really descriptive review of this novel. But I will say a few things about my response to it.

1) It made me sad. Well, sadder. I was already pretty sad for a number of reasons and this book did not help. It's about a girl who is a victim to all of the emotions in the world. Her brother is mentally and later physically absent from her life, her dad gives up, and her mother is an incredibly selfish, self-absorbed woman, and Rose suffers a lot of disappoint...more

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Aug 03, 2010 Hannah Jane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, love

Wow. Extremely disturbing and haunting. And it was so depressing for most of the book but only because I didn't understand it until much too late.

I will list my most favorite parts.

#1. On page 64 - "...The punching bag tucked inside every chocolate chip." Also on the next page when the sandwich is telling her to love it. So funny and so incredibly inventive.

#2. Chapter 20 - This page was the very first time it hit me that no one ever sent anything to the grandma. And it really hit me. I had to...more

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Nov 09, 2012 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: that-dreadful-pain, what-a-character

1st I read Amy Bender's other books and liked them. Especially Girl in the Flammable Skirt."

2nd This book came out and I was confused about the chocolate frosting on a lemon cake. I thought the designers used a stock photo and were stupid. I dismissed this book.

3rd I read this review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/.... I'm the deleted member who calls bullshit.

4th My husband likes the Haagen-Dazs Five series of ice cream. His favorite are lemon and chocolate. Not wanting to choose, he bro...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Khaya rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of "Bee Season" and/or magic realism

Recommended to Khaya by: Marg was reading it and it was available for download on audio -- how often does that happen?

Shelves: audiobooks, scifi-fantasy-magicrealism, highlyoriginal, situation-not-a-story

At the age of nine, Rose Edelstein suddenly discovers a hidden talent – when tasting a homemade food, she can taste the emotions of the person who prepared the food. Nine-year-old Rose is now privy to information she never had and didn’t especially need – her mother’s hidden unhappiness, mostly, as well as that of other people. It’s a heavy burden for a child to bear. The idea of this book is inspired and unique and asks an interesting if somewhat unoriginal question – what happens when a child...more At the age of nine, Rose Edelstein suddenly discovers a hidden talent – when tasting a homemade food, she can taste the emotions of the person who prepared the food. Nine-year-old Rose is now privy to information she never had and didn’t especially need – her mother’s hidden unhappiness, mostly, as well as that of other people. It’s a heavy burden for a child to bear. The idea of this book is inspired and unique and asks an interesting if somewhat unoriginal question – what happens when a child is inadvertently exposed to painful secrets about the adults in her life?

As someone who loves both reading and cooking, I tend to approach food fiction with highly inflated expectations – I’m sure I’ll just love this! – which, unfortunately, are often a set-up for disappointment. I also wonder whether authors/publishers of culinary fiction sometimes rely on the incorporation of food as a gimmick to compensate for mediocrity, expecting readers like me to be sufficiently excited about the food writing and the “differentness” of the genre to lower their literary standards otherwise. Because ultimately, although this book had some good writing, I wasn’t as crazy about it as I was hoping to be.

One of the problems I had with the book’s execution was that the concept of Rose’s gift, creative though it was, could only carry the narrative so far. After a while, it seemed that Aimee needed to introduce a new and unrelated plot simply to keep the story going and basically abandoned the storyline of Rose’s talent. I think that writing the book as a short story focusing on Rose’s tasting and its ramifications would have been a better choice, especially since the second plot was rather vague and alienating. I also agree with my sister’s observation that Rose was never entirely believable as a narrator – not as a precocious nine-year-old, nor as a twelve-year-old or young adult.

I had a little déjà vu while reading this as this book reminded me very much of “Bee Season,” a novel which managed to engage me while I read it but ultimately left me feeling lost. There were several parallels – as in “Bee Season,” the main character of “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” is an average preadolescent girl who suddenly discovers she has an unusual gift, one which gives her newfound and not always welcome prescience. Even the disengaged family was similar to the one in “Bee Season” – two middle-aged parents settled into a routine and not entirely satisfying marriage which is about to be shaken up, a brilliant older brother favored by one parent and engaging in a mysterious private life. And just as “Bee Season” left me scratching my head and saying, “Nice writing and all, but what was that?” this book left me with a similar reaction at times though perhaps not as consistently or as strongly as “Bee Season” did.

As a non-fan of magic realism, I probably wasn’t the right reader for this book. Additionally, I suspect that listening to this book on audio was a poor choice. I recognized that the prose was lovely but couldn’t appreciate it the way I might have had I been reading it as a text, which may be why the book often felt slow to me. I should probably factor in the fact that the author read the book rather than a professional reader. I might have assumed this to be a good choice, but the author read in a slow near-monotone which detracted from the listening experience.

I always waver, especially with books in the 3-star range, whether the rating should reflect my subjective experience or my objective assessment. Here, because I ultimately felt alienated by the book even as I recognized some of its merits, I’m going to go with my subjective experience and give it 2 stars. I could see others liking this book, but it didn’t do it for me.(less)

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Mar 23, 2011 Nancy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sometimes I really, really want to like a book. I really wanted to love "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake," because the lovely Sherry H so kindly sent it to me. Thanks, Sherry! That was so nice of you!

My initial resistance to this novel was that I thought it would be too twee, too frothily chick-littish, and it was neither of those things. Bender is an eloquent writer with a gift for stripping her characters down to their quivering nerve-ends. Unfortunately for me, though, this novel falls s...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Alicia rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-books-read

This book had a great premise, but went absolutely nowhere. Ok, so she can taste people's feelings and exactly where the food came from. Seems like two totally different talents to me, but here are combined as one. I wish it would've only been people's feelings because i think the author takes an easy out with having Rose want to eat only highly processed foods because there is less human interaction. This gives Rose an easy way to not deal with her problem. I also thought the entire Joseph stor...more

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Mar 30, 2011 Melissa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: food-and-drink, young-adult

Unfortunately for me, this book did not live up to the expectations I had for it, having been on the waitlist at the library to read it for three months.
It's an interesting concept, being able to taste the feelings of whomever cooked your food. The part that had me mark this as only okay, was the lack of depth of the characters, at least in my opinion. They just seemed flat somehow. By the end of the book the oddities and strangeness between the family makes more sense, as you learn that the br...more

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Jun 16, 2010 oriana rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2010, why-werent-you-better

after: oh dear. oh Aimee. i love you so, have loved you so, continue to love you so, but i am so sorry to say that this book was a bit of a disappointment. it felt... unfinished. hinted at. like an early draft, almost. i know how stunning you can be, and it isn't that this is bad or anything... it's just not up to the standard i expected. which is probably partially my fault. probably just like The Ticking Is the Bomb , just like The Learners , just like The Great Perhaps , just like all post- R...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Stephanie (Stepping out of the Page) rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2011, comfort-novels, adult-fiction, title-appeal, let-down, magical-realism, not-for-me, books-i-own

After finishing this book, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. I did enjoy it, but I expected it to be more special, to be able to intrigue me a lot more than it actually did. The writing was peculiar and I found it difficult to get used to, but I did adjust to it - I still didn't like the fact that no speechmarks were used though! I thought that all of the characters were interesting, particularly Joseph, but I also think that the whole issue with Joseph and his disappearances just ov...more

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Mar 18, 2010 Leah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: tob

Ohhhhhh, so, so good! At nine, Rose bites into a piece of cake and discovers that she can taste the emotions of whomever made the food she is eating. I kind of felt like Rose while reading this book - I could feel the emotions of the characters, which made it an intense, moving, slightly overwhelming experience. I feel like I've been run over by an emotional tractor, but not in a bad way...just in that my-god-life-is-messy-and-beautiful-and-how-the-hell-do-we-make-sense-of-it kind of way. Phew....more

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Mar 03, 2011 Tracy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, fiction, kindle

Reading this so I can talk and/or rage about it with Mattie.

I left a lot of rage in my comment on another review, but I will just say this book was an utter disappointment. The lack of quotation marks was annoying, but I could have gotten past that. Rose's ability was interesting in and of itself, but the author failed absolutely at doing anything interesting WITH it ... for a good half of the book it was an afterthought, an irrelevance. And when it was mentioned, it was disjointed, incoherent a...more

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Feb 03, 2012 Noce rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: narrativa-americana

Manifestazioni in piazza, Italia paralizzata, il malcontento lievita e le torte dicono “No!”

Stamattina l’Italia si è svegliata col più dolce degli aromi, quello delle torte in forno e delle paste alla crema. Purtroppo non è tutto oro quel che odora. Ma sentiamo cos’ha da dirci il nostro inviato.

- Sì, buongiorno, qua la situazione è critica. All’inizio sembrava una qualsiasi manifestazione pacifica, ma le forze dell’ordine non erano preparate a un tale incremento di manifestanti.

Ci sono cortei ch...more

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Feb 10, 2013 ♪ Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-star

An unusual coming-of-age story about a girl with an unusual gift.

Rose Edelstein can taste emotions in the food she eats - whatever the person who prepared the food feels, and all the way down to the individual ingredients. At nine, she discovers her mother’s emptiness and despair in a slice of lemon birthday cake. As her ability develops, she becomes privy to secrets that puzzle and overwhelm her, and for awhile she takes refuge in processed foods that have less contact with human hands. But in...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Velma rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of treacle

Shelves: fiction, arcs-galleys-proofs, 2011-reads

Ugh. I'm glad I didn't pay for this book - yay for ARCs!

I can't really put my finger on what went wrong here, but apparently I have a mutation on my chick-lit gene that predisposes my knee to jerk up suddenly when I find myself in the middle of a coming-of-age novel. This recipe has too much sugar for my taste.

This ARC was provided to me by the publisher via my local Indie bookstore, and no money was exchanged.

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Nov 13, 2010 mark monday rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: these-fragile-lives

when i first met aimee bender in a writing class at ucsd, she was the most magical yet misunderstood writer in the room. over two decades later, it's nice to see that nothing has changed. she is consistently original. i'd say that she writes like a lighter, equally offbeat, miniature version of tom robbins. except i don't really like robbins and i sure do like bender. go, aimee bender! go, ucsd!

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Jul 06, 2011 Amanda Patterson rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Rose Edelstein's life changes when she eats the cake her mother bakes on her 9th birthday. She inexplicably tastes every emotion her mother has. And it's not a good thing. Her beautiful mother tastes empty and small, and full of despair. Food becomes a battleground for the terrified child. She cannot explain what is happening to her.
Her brother, Joseph, is her mother's gift, her ‘guide’. But Joseph is a loner, trapped in an interior world, unable to interact with others. Her father is the perfec...more

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Jan 02, 2011 Neil Schleifer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, fantasy

In this strangely dreamlike narrative, Rose Edelstein can taste in the food people cook the emotions of those who created it. In fact, as the book goes on, we learn that most of the Edelstein family has the gift … or curse … of empathizing with others in various sensory ways – taste, smell and physical transformation. Rather than make them more positively sensitive about the feelings of others, however, it turns each of them into solitary creatures who will do anything NOT to feel. They avoid, t...more

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Feb 19, 2011 Jill rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: goodreads-firstreads

First and foremost, I want to thank the Goodreads FirstRead program and the publisher for gifting me with a copy of this book. I wish I could review it more favorably.

Lemon Cake appears to have all the ingredients of success: a talented author, a fascinating start, an intriguing premise. Yet at the end of the day, this “cake” just seems to fall flat.

The beginning is promising enough: nine-year-old Rose Edelstein bites into her mother’s homemade cake and discovers to her own astonishment that she...more First and foremost, I want to thank the Goodreads FirstRead program and the publisher for gifting me with a copy of this book. I wish I could review it more favorably.

Lemon Cake appears to have all the ingredients of success: a talented author, a fascinating start, an intriguing premise. Yet at the end of the day, this “cake” just seems to fall flat.

The beginning is promising enough: nine-year-old Rose Edelstein bites into her mother’s homemade cake and discovers to her own astonishment that she can actually taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. This reminded me a lot of a recent book I read, Bitter In the Mouth, by Monique Truong. In that book, the character suffered from auditory-gustatory synesthesia – the ability to “taste” words as a result of a “neurological condition that caused the involuntary mixing of the senses.” In this book, Rose can taste emotions.

Yet inexplicably, Ms. Bender introduces yet another complication: Rose can also “taste” exactly the location and factory in which the food originated. This added gift adds absolutely nothing to the plot and in fact, muddies the waters.

By reading the book jacket, it appears to a prospective reader that the book centers around Rose and this unusual gift. In reality, it does not. Less than one-third into the book, the story switches largely to Joseph, Rose’s brother, who also possesses an unusual gift – the ability to disappear. The problem is, the reader never gets a nuanced sense of who Joseph is. He appears to be a loner, someone who doesn’t relate easily to others, an undiscovered genius. But there is no emotional investment in his character. When it is revealed how he disappears – a rather ludicrous plot twist – it seems less poignant than humorous.

I believe I understand what Ms. Bender was striving to accomplish. The underlying theme is about the difficulty of growing up, the choices we make to stay in the world or disappear from it, the ways we imperfectly try to understand and love each other. But the book is simply too ambitious for its own good with too many sub-plots competing for dominancy. The magical and realistic aspects fought against each other; this novel never decided whether it wanted to opt for one or the other.

With a few exceptions – for example, I thought the depiction of the daughter-father relationship was excellent and some of the coming-of-age scenes to be right-on – I felt disengaged.

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Jun 21, 2010 Katherine rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, general-fiction, food, magical-realism

I'm several chapters in and annoyed at the author's choice to completely ignore the style rule of punctuating dialogue with quotation marks. Hello? There's a reason for the rule, it alerts the reader that the words enclosed within those quotation marks are spoken words and allows the writing to flow smoothly.

Over the last few years we've seen more and more books published where writers attempt to be innovative or clever by messing with standard punctuation and in my opinion few have been succes...more I'm several chapters in and annoyed at the author's choice to completely ignore the style rule of punctuating dialogue with quotation marks. Hello? There's a reason for the rule, it alerts the reader that the words enclosed within those quotation marks are spoken words and allows the writing to flow smoothly.

Over the last few years we've seen more and more books published where writers attempt to be innovative or clever by messing with standard punctuation and in my opinion few have been successful at it. Here it's just plain silly, as if the author couldn't rely on her writing alone but had to resort to tricks to stand out.

I'll give it a few more chapters...

I finished the book and have very mixed feelings about it.

The writing is good and quite lovely at times, especially in describing the food and the emotions it evokes for Rose. However, two things keep me from recommending the book. First, that Bender chose not to use quotation marks, I was hoping that after completing the book I would see a reason for the decision but I still see none. It's confusing to the reader and adds nothing to the experience that I can determine. Still puzzles me. And second that halfway through the book the author switches the focus from Rose and her special "gift" to her brother and the two stories never fully coalesce. Where Bender takes this tangent moves the story out of the realm of I-can-buy-this magical realism to the land of truly bizarre. She does attempt to tie the two together in the end but for me it was less than successful and ultimately unsatisfying.

I'd give the book three stars for moments of wonderful writing, but I'm taking away one star for the bad choice of punctuation, which includes not only the complete lack of quotation marks but also the baffling use of "--." as a part of dialogue, and the strange schizophrenic nature of the story. So two stars--it was okay. Not recommended unless you're a die-hard fan of the author or enjoy more experimental writing. (less)

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Jan 01, 2013 Florence MacIntosh rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Florence by: Hooked by Title and Cover

Shelves: 2012, family, awards, magical-realism, reviewed

Okay, I’ll bite…A premise both odd and original; about a girl who at the tender age of nine develops the ability to taste the feelings of the person who prepares her food. Obviously she learns more than she can handle, most difficult is the window to her own mother’s sadness. It’s full of the complications of a borderline dysfunctional family, some of whom have their own strange, hidden abilities. I liked the pacing, the way the story quietly unfolded.
Problem was it felt incomplete, too many lo...more

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Feb 28, 2013 Hanne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fell-in-love-with-the-title, 2013-challenge, contemporary-fiction, shelf-a-ton-15

Do you know the painter Magritte?
He's one of the most famous surrealistic painters this world has ever seen. He had a remarkable, magical and quirky view of the world, and a strange preference for bowler hats.

This book reminds me of that quirky surrealism. And this painting in particular came to mind when reading this book. Those who read it might understand what i mean.

The story is told by Rose, who discovers as a little girl that she can pick up the emotions of people through their cooking. Sa...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Toni rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the story of Rose, a girl who, upon turning 9 years old, is suddenly able to taste people’s emotions through tasting food that they’ve prepared. This leads her to finding out about her mother’s feelings of desperation and sadness under the veneer of cheerful domesticity. An interesting concept.

However I found it could have been more pleasurable to read if the author had taken the protagonist’s age into consideration, as the story is initially told from the view point of Rose as a 9-year-...more

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Oct 17, 2011 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction

All right, this is much of what I'm looking for in literary fiction. Many of the things that can bog a literary novel down go right here. The Edelstein family is made up of lost, flawed people who nonetheless are trying and so win your heart in their ordinariness. The plot is gentle and wholly subservient to character development, but Bender does have an ending in mind. No one's living happily ever after, but there's enough resolution to feel like an actual story. Since I frequently get terribly...more

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Confused?	7	60	May 03, 2013 02:11pm
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Father vs mum	2	35	Oct 01, 2012 10:04am
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About Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

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“Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.” — 42 people liked it

“Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children...

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.” — 27 people liked it

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