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.