|
Loading... The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cakeby Aimee Bender
I didn't hate it but it's very sad. I would describe the family as superheros with powers that have no benefit and seem unnecessary for anything practical. The family dynamic is not great. There's some adultry going on and the mom seems to favor one child over the other. I never really understood what was going on with the brother his "super power" was the craziest. It was not what I expected when I first started reading it. (  ) JenniferLynn | May 13, 2013 |  Intersting book. Enjoyed reading it. (  ) shazjhb | Apr 29, 2013 | Beautifully written, evocative but strange. Not sure how to rate. Brother's ending and father's hospital phobia challenging! ( ) clublist | Apr 28, 2013 | I didn't dislike this book but I am not entirely sure that I liked it either. At about the halfway point I thought that the plot reached its high point and then just meandered towards the ending. The ending itself was not earth shattering. It just ended. I was disappointed. (  ) ilefkowitz | Apr 26, 2013 | I loved this book. Bender has a way of conveying the emotions of the characters in a way that feels subtle enough to be real and yet strong enough to make the feelings comprehensible. Too many times, when I read a sad book, it feels heavy handed. None of that comes across here, and perhaps others would disagree that it is a sad book, but for me I truly felt the longing, the isolation, and the sometimes depression of Rose Edelstein. Others criticize the book for its "magical" aspects, but at the end of the day, I felt like the book fulfilled one of the missions of magical realism for me, namely that the magic allowed me to understand the characters in a way that simple realism would not be able to (and, of course, none of this story would be possible without the magic). Anyone who has ever felt different in a way that cannot be explained or who has felt isolated from the world at large will enjoy this book. If nothing else, Bender's prose is simple and yet gorgeous and easy to get lost in. The ending was somewhat heartbreaking for me personally, but completely in keeping with the rest of the book. What I will take away from this book was the relationships between the family members. The emotional storm of Rose's mother and her love for Rose (but her selfishness as well for her own needs), her father's seeming quiet detachment from her and the rest of the family (but of course, a lot is going on there that you only find out about later), and especially her relationship with her brother. Every character felt full and complete (a rarity, it seems, in books these days) and I really have not enjoyed a book this much in quite a long time. (  ) Raven9167 | Apr 13, 2013 |
 Had the novel focused only on this imaginative food conceit, it would have been merely clever - but Bender is too good a writer for that. She uses Rose's secret burden as a means of exploring the painful limits of empathy, the perils of loneliness, and Rose's deeply dysfunctional family. Bender has inherited at least three profound strains, three genetic codes or lines of inquiry from her forebears in American literature. There's the Faulknerian loneliness, the isolation that comes from our utter inability, as human beings, to truly communicate with each other; the crippling power of empathy (how to move forward when everyone around you is in pain) that is so common in our literature it's hard to attach a name to it, and the distance created by humor, a willfully devil-may-care attitude that allowed, for example, Mark Twain to skip with seeming abandon around serious issues like racism and poverty.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385501129, Hardcover)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. 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). (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:07:05 -0500) Being able to taste people's emotions in food may at first be horrifying. But young, unassuming Rose Edelstein grows up learning to harness her gift as she becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. |
 Google Books — Loading...
Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.38)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13
2
Wikipedia in English (1)
2