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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
BUDDY READ: Adult Fiction
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, Starting March 14, 2019
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This sounds intriguing - hoping I'll have time to join you on this.
I’m a little behind on this, but hoping to start in a day or so.
Up to ch3. Rose’s gift could seem a cursed one. She taps into emotions and ideas, without really understanding the ideas.
Up to ch7. Slow. Rolling along, but Rose’s inability to articulate her experience makes it hard for people to accept this.
Up to ch10. Rose’s family seem exhausting. Certainly mum and brother exhibit signs of disorders/autism. Is the food thing an attempt to make sense of her experience?
Up to ch14. Dipping into the past we see how the parents get together. Nothing really happening.
Up to ch20. Every family member seems to exist without really engaging with anyone else. Maybe the food stuff is a way of exploring this.
Up to ch35. Too weird. Not even sure I’m following what’s happening here.
Up to ch41. Can’t make up my mind if this is really miserable or thoughtful.
Finished. Review on home page. Infuriating. Loved parts of it, but really disliked it at times. Nit a book that’s easy to engage with.
Karen wrote: "Up to ch7. Slow. Rolling along, but Rose’s inability to articulate her experience makes it hard for people to accept this."(view spoiler)
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 mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.
The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle).