Title: The Particular Sadness of Lemon CakeAuthor: Aimee Bender
Rose Edelstein has a gift. Or a curse. It's hard to tell which. She can taste the emotional state of the person who has cooked the food she eats. She's able to sense her mother's depression, and later her extramarital affair, by what she serves the family for dinner. She never knows whether she'll be elevated or crushed by her meals, so she learns to rely on prepackaged, factory-made meals, which taste less like emotion and more like cardboard. Rose eventually learns that she's not the only one in her family with unusual powers. Her father's intense fear of hospitals seems to stem from his belief that "something will happen to him" if he goes there. And Rose's brilliant older brother gets absorbed, literally, by the "gifts" he possesses.
I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of magical realism as a genre. I think that Bender gives us adequate knowledge that things aren't always what they seem, since Rose's "gifts" become apparent in the first chapter of the book, but everyone else in the novel seems so normal, that just seems like a personality quirk. I expected the story to end with Rose finding a way to resolve her gifts with her ambitions, but it moved to a completely different place, and the ending felt unsatisfying. I liked the premise, but wish that Bender had gone in a different direction with the plot.
1 comment:
that's kind of how I felt about I Am Not A Serial Killer...I kept expecting the book to have an explanation for the situation that wasn't in the paranormal realm. For that reason I really didn't like it by the end. I think I'll skip Lemon Cake for this reason (even though we're big fans of lemon cake in our family).
♥
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