THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE: REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY ENDED
THE PARTICULAR SADNESS
OF LEMON CAKE
BY AIMEE BENDER

ABOUT THE BOOK:

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 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which is soon to be out, and so far made a couple people cry. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She's received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

MY REVIEW:

It is no wonder that Aimee Bender’s THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE is a huge summer hit! The title immediately drew me with my sweet tooth but then kept my attention even though it wasn’t about baking. As I began to read about the story's main idea centering around a young woman who can tell other people's true feelings by tasting the food that they have prepared, I was intrigued. At first, I thought what a gift she has but as I read, I realized that perhaps this was more of a curse at least until she learned to control it to her advantage.

The story opens as Rose Edelstein is nine-years-old living in Los Angeles with her somewhat detached father, who is however an amiable lawyer; her mother who is outwardly loving, but empty inside; and her 14 year-old genius brother Joseph, who just can’t turn that talent into any kind of success academically. Rose also has a grandmother from her mother’s side who lives in Washington State and is probably the strangest of them all. On the day she tastes her mother’s lemon cake with the chocolate icing made especially for her birthday, Rose realizes that food that she eats is “full of feelings”. The food reveals emotions of the person who prepared the food. As Rose begins to try to understand what all this means, she only confides in her brother Joseph and his best friend George.

George takes Rose on like some kind of experiment and begins to test what she can do. He calls her a “magic food psychic” and for a while, Rose adores him. George takes her to places to taste things such as the bakery they visit where she finds “angry” chocolate chip cookies and a ham and cheese sandwich that is “yelling”. It is hard to even imagine what Rose is experiencing especially since food to most of us always has some kind of emotion attached by eating it, and to think that our feelings could be interpreted by someone like Rose is bizarre and unnerving.

Rose tries to use this “gift” to try to hold her family together even after her mother, for instance starts a new career going to school for carpentry but winds up having an affair with her leader, which of course Rose can tell by tasting. When Joseph goes away to college and starts to disappear gradually from their lives no matter how hard his mother tries to hold on to him, the family really falls apart. Rose works hard to find her own way in life and learn to live with her ability. Bender has written a gentle, caring story with tremendous compassion as we find Rose near the end of the book, in her twenties, finally learning to use her talent in a rewarding way. This is an odd book but in a good way and one that was really hard to put down. It caught my attention right away and has stayed with me since I finished it.

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