Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The first full meal I’d made on my own. My hand shaking a little as I bit in.
The sauce was good, and simple, and thick.
Sadness, rage, tanks, holes, hope, guilt, tantrums. Nostalgia, like rotting flowers. A factory, cold.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender

This book is inside me now, and I’m somehow different for having read it.

Somewhere between the magical fantasy of Sarah Addison Allen, and the magical sadness of Alice Hoffman, is Aimee Bender’s magical book. A book about Rose, a girl who discovers, unexpectedly and unwanted, her ability to taste people’s emotions in food. Alone and bewildered she embarks on a journey to explore her talent, a journey which often results in overwhelming sensations, uncovered secrets, and unprecedented outcomes.

We move with Rose as she learns of her talent, of her family’s secrets, and of the world surrounding her. She’s not a normal girl, she’s very much alone. She has friends, but she’s the one on the edge of the group, the one who could be there or not, and not many people would notice the difference. We are with her as she desperately tries to form a connection with her brother Joseph. But Joseph is also a loner, with only one friend, and he’s full of books and angst and something unexplained.

The books transitions frequently, starting with Rose’s difficult younger years trying to find food she can eat that won’t make her sick with depression or anger. We go through the years of issues with her parents, her father stoic, her mother yearning. We spend much time with Joseph and his story becomes so overwhelmingly sad it makes my heart hurt. We grow with Rose, and find her older as she discovers a path she can take toward a future that will make her happy. A path she tremulously sets out on, an experiment of self.

This is not a story with a beginning-middle-end type of plot. There is a beginning, and then the beginning just keeps on being. Every part has a newness to it, an unfounded, unexplored, beautifully untouched set of words that pulls you in and takes you. Like food to Rose,  this book leaves me with an unexplained lingering of sadness. Light and innocent sadness. Sadness for no reason, but beautiful and untouchable.

Words like “amazing” and “fabulous” are too patronizingly cliché for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. At all times charmingly funny and tragic, it just is what it is; something you should read, something that starts out different and takes a bit of getting used to, and then finishes like a ghost of words, whispered away on a breeze, leaving you wondering.

5 stars

(I received this book from the publisher for review)