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Dec 12, 2011

Gavin rated it:

****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 More...

27 comments like (72 people liked it)

Feb 27, 2011

Nancy rated it:

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 fo More...

20 comments like (44 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2010

Audrey rated it:

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6 comments like (35 people liked it)

Feb 16, 2011

Miki rated it:

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11 comments like (42 people liked it)

Oct 06, 2011

Kelly rated it:

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...

6 comments like (24 people liked it)

Apr 22, 2011

Kelly rated it:

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1 comment like (15 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2011

Khaya rated it:

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 chi More...

6 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 23, 2011

Nancy rated it:

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, More...

4 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2011

Alicia rated it:

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 More...

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Jun 29, 2010

oriana rated it:

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-Rant More...

8 comments like (25 people liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

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...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2010

Leah rated it:

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...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2011

Tracy rated it:

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, More...

0 comments like (20 people liked it)

Feb 03, 2012

Noce rated it:

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 manifest More...

22 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 03, 2011

mark rated it:

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!

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2012

Erika rated it:

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, sad-er. 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 o More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 07, 2011

Amanda rated it:

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 p More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2011

Neil rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Feb 19, 2011

Jill rated it:

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 h More...

6 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2010

Katherine rated it:

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 More...

19 comments like (34 people liked it)

Aug 03, 2010

Jennie rated it:

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

14 comments like (39 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2011

Toni rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 17, 2011

Rebecca rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 17, 2011

Emily rated it:

When I discovered that I had won an ARC of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake from the GoodReads Giveaway program, I was both excited and worried. I have read a lot of reviews of Lemon Cake, and it seems to be one of those books that people either absolutely love or totally despise. Well, after a few days of reading, I am happy to announce that I belong to the first category. This book was a calm and contemplative journey into the inner world of a young girl trying to come to terms with her fa More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 23, 2011

Lauren rated it:

Aimee Bender is a wonderful author and her newest book is just as lovely as her previous three. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is about a girl, Rose, who can taste emotions in food. Whatever the person preparing the food felt, she feels too. It’s especially problematic when it comes to the food her mother makes – every bite is redolent with her mother’s aching loneliness. Rose knows when her mother is happy (which is rarely), when she’s sad (which is always) and when she embarks on an affa More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2011

Velma rated it:

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.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2010

Tracy rated it:

This book was entirely different than what I expected when I started reading it. It's literary fiction, but it has elements of fantasy thrown in. It kind of reminded me of The Time Traveler's Wife. One thing I didn't like, was the lack of quotation marks. It makes reading dialog very difficult!

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 23, 2011

Jeana rated it:

Okay, this book took a really weird turn for me about 3/4 of the way through. I was going along with it, enjoying the read, and liked the elements of tasting people in the food they prepared (even though I thought it could have been expressed a little better). But the last part is just plain weird.

SPOILER:
While I suspended my realistic nature for most of the book, when Joseph started becoming a chair, it lost me. It lost my trust and my favor. The writing was good. I lik More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2011

Paula rated it:

We read that most Supernatural novels , ones that the child or teens have abilities tend to be Children's or YA/Teen books but very rarely will you find an Adult Fiction one , when I first saw this book - It was a LP copy and I just can't stand reading LP , so I was glad that I could find it in the Fiction section. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake follows the life of 9 yr old Rose who on the day of her 9th birthday tries a lemon cake that her mum has baked for her , but unlike anything she More...

0 comments like

Aug 09, 2011

Jen added it

No one but Laura Esquivel should be allowed to write about tasting emotions in food. Sarah Addison Allen and Aimee Bender, I'm talking to YOU.

Bender's premise is excellent. Magical realism is my favorite genre, so unlike other reviewers, WEIRD doesn't bother me. Unfortunately, Bender's protagonist, Rose, is such a dull everygirl (hello, Bella Swan the Second!) that I'm not able to care much about what happens to her. Rose's detachment is off-putting. Half of the book describes Rose as she meande More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)