** spoiler alert ** 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.