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I had been looking forward to reading Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake for months. I started hearing buzz for it last winter after Nancy Pearl recommended it at the PLA Conference. It made my list of hot summer reads. It turned out to be a rather different book than I was expecting.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a hard book to describe. The cover fooled me a little. The light blue and yellow had me thinking it housed a book every bit as light and fluffy as the cake on its cover. Likewise, knowing there was a touch of magic to the story, I had anticipated something akin to Sarah Addison Allen’s books. There was no whimsy in Lemon Cake though, nor was it fluffy. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was, as Mrs V at Librarian Says put it, thought-provoking.
Rose Edelstein is just your typical nine-year-old girl until her mother bakes her a beautiful lemon cake with chocolate icing for her ninth birthday. Rose’s first bite from that cake is the first time she tastes more than just cake. She tastes and feels the emotions of the person who made it.
I could taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down ... None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a lack of wholeness to the flavours that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding the hollowness. (Page 10)
Rose’s family is dysfunctional. Her mother is lost and needy, particularly reliant on her brother Joseph. Her brother, once considered a genius, is a reclusive science geek. Her father is there in presence but is uninvolved in so many ways. Through it all, Rose struggles with emotions that are not hers.
Rose quickly stops telling people about her skill and how food makes her feel. She alienates friends. She cannot eat her brother Joseph’s toast. She discovers things about her family, her mother in particular, that she simply does not want to know. She begins to worship vending machines for giving her food that no hands have made. The factory food gives her relief.
Halfway through the book there is a shift and her family begins to revolve around Joseph. Where does he go? Why can’t they find him? Why does he disappear? We get some answers but are largely left to our own devices to figure it all out. And this where people start to struggle with the book. I think that Candid Culture summed up what a lot of people felt quite well:
[...]I felt that the author never delved deeply enough into her brother's character to make it that interested in him or his struggles.After finishing the book, I still don't completely understand his "skill" and have to say that I lost interest once the book changed its focus to his struggles. Though I thought there were plenty of directions this novel could take, it didn't take any and instead took on an almost science fiction twist that left me dissatisfied and disappointed.
Nothing drives a reader more crazy than having stuff left unexplained, but the thing is that the how and the why with Joseph doesn’t really matter. All of that is the catalyst that pushes Rose to stop hiding and to find her own life. In her attempts to try to hide from the emotions in the food that she consumes, she loses herself. She’s as hollow as her mother’s lemon cake. Joseph’s storyline is what pushes her to want more for herself.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was not the book I thought it was going to be -- it was much, much more.
Contributing Editor Sassymonkey also blogs at Sassymonkey and
