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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010)

by Aimee Bender

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,3992743,765 (3.34)236
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).… (more)
  1. 162
    Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (DetailMuse)
  2. 70
    Bee Season by Myla Goldberg (whymaggiemay)
    whymaggiemay: Both are novels about families dealing with issues and undergoing changes.
  3. 62
    The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Electablue)
  4. 41
    The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister (DetailMuse)
  5. 30
    The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (KatyBee)
    KatyBee: Both have a main character with a unique 'gift' and are well written with a family relationships theme.
  6. 31
    The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (wisemetis)
    wisemetis: Magical realism that relies heavily on food throughout the narrative.
  7. 10
    The Dead Zone by Stephen King (Ciruelo)
  8. 10
    The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (akblanchard)
    akblanchard: Both books use magical realism to illuminate family relationships.
  9. 00
    Mind-Find by Wilanne Belden (infiniteletters)
    infiniteletters: Different types of books, true, but some of the same family problems.
  10. 00
    As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (SqueakyChu)
    SqueakyChu: Moving from one world to another...
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» See also 236 mentions

English (268)  Italian (1)  Spanish (1)  German (1)  Catalan (1)  Hungarian (1)  All languages (273)
Showing 1-5 of 268 (next | show all)
This story is strange and I don't understand it at all, but I loved it anyway. ( )
  hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |
Was totally disappointed with this book. I feel like the time I spent reading it was wasted. I had thought it was a coming of age story about a little girl who could taste the cook's emotions in the food she ate. For example, she could taste her mother's unhappiness in a slice of cake, or once at a bakery, she could taste the anger in whatever it was she was eating that day. It sounded like an interesting idea to me which prompted me to try the book.

I ended up really disliking this book. It went way beyond the charm of a child tasting unhappiness or love or anger when she was able to idenitfy eggs as organic or cookies as coming from a factory in a specific part of the country. Spoiler alert ... if you plan on reading this book, stop reading this now.

The character of the girl had promise; but the rest of the family was a dysfunctional mess. It was hard to care about any of them. When it turned out the strange brother had "magical" qualities too, it was a bit much. Was I supposed to figure out that he would disappear into furniture because he enjoyed taking splinters out of his mom's fingers? Too odd for me.
( )
  ellink | Jan 22, 2024 |
No closure. This book gives you no closure.

But it does give you an experience. If you are willing to suspend your disbelief and your critical voice, if you are willing to jump in and take the ride, in return Aimee Bender gives you the experience of being the emotionally neglected child in a family of individuals too consumed with their own problems.

See, Rose has little interior emotional life she can tell the reader. She has little interior emotional life she can tell herself. And no one in her family is listening– much less knows how to teach her to navigate her own emotions. Or life, for that matter.

So when she starts being able to taste the feelings of those who make her food, whether her mom in the family kitchen or the individual in a far away factory, she's in real trouble. This skill/gift/talent/curse would be nearly unnavigable for a child in a supportive family; it would be confusing and overwhelming for an adult with some sense of self.

But for the younger child of a family who already has a child who has extra needs, and for parents who themselves cannot navigate their own lives separately or together, tasting the emotions of others in your food means you are utterly screwed.

It's not in a "Like Water for Chocolate" way: the romance of food, and the enjoyment of life even when it's horrible.

It's more in the line of my-food-is-trying-to-kill-me.

And following the story of what a person has to do to herself to survive under those circumstances isn't done with a narrator with a full, functional voice. It's done in the voice of someone who has hollowed herself out, stripped away parts of herself so she can perhaps survive. The amount of heartbreak in this book is not for the faint of heart: by the last few scenes I was sobbing so hard I thought I would throw up. A feel-good book this isn't; no redeeming Nick Hornby moments here. Bender has written in such a masterful way that she creates the hollowed-out, desperate, needy feelings in this reader as in her protagonist.

I was willing to take the ride: by the third or so chapter I recognized something true about it, as the younger child of an extra needs sibling. Once I waded into it, which was pretty slow going to be honest, I couldn't stop reading. I was drawn from chapter to chapter with Bender's promise of filling that hollowness or neediness with Something. Anything. Please! God! It reminded me of Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Murakami) in this way, pulling me from chapter to chapter as I sought to resolve the same hollowness and confusion in me-as-reader as in the protagonist.

It's a promise she never fulfills and a hollowness never filled. It's never filled for Rose, either. ( )
  deliriumshelves | Jan 14, 2024 |
I am trying to do the 2021 Popsugar Challenge this year. Or should I say I am trying to complete more than eight tasks that I did last year. I am happy to announce that I am halfway there and with this book, I have completed four tasks.
When I first started reading this book, I was intrigued by the concept. Rose, the main character, develops the ability to feel the emotions of the people who have cooked anything she eats. The book starts well as Rose begins to understand her "abilities" and is written in a way that seems realistic for a girl her age who cannot quite figure out what is going on. As the book progresses, Rose begins to identify upsetting information related to her mother. While all this is going on, her brother, who is described by the author as a bit of an oddball with no real explanation, also begins to act strangely. Then there is the backstory of Rose's distant relationship with her father, which climaxes with a story about his own family that relates to Rose's own powers. The problem I had is that there was a lot of emotion in the food and it was described beautifully, but none of it played out successfully within the family. It was just sort of left hanging. Additionally, the story with the brother and his own "gifts" was almost overload, nor was it well explained. The ending felt very rushed to me, as if the author had some great ideas, lumped them all in one book. I wish some details were better explained even if that means the book would have been a bit longer. This is my first book by Aimee Bender and also my first 3-star read this year. While I gave it a lower rating than you might expect I will be interested to read something new by the author if something becomes available soon.
( )
  b00kdarling87 | Jan 7, 2024 |
A sad but totally thought-provoking story about a girl with a very unusual ability--she can taste feelings in food. Really, the pull of this book is the usual family drama, (a genre I generally refer to as "unhappy suburban marriage books"). I've read a lot of those books because I'm interested in people's secret inner lives--their hidden sadnesses, their weird joys, their struggles to be happy. What makes Lemon Cake special is this crazy magical food-psychic element. It allows a nine-year-old kid to have a window into her grown-up mother's secret inner life. And it also makes her see the world in a completely unique and weird way.

The girl, Rose, was so sad, though. I just wanted her to be happy, but this book has precious few light moments. It's mostly angst, which can turn a lot of readers off. And I wasn't a fan of all of Aimee Bender's sentence fragments because while reading it, I was like, how hard is it to just insert the word "is" and make that a complete sentence? It's a little pretentious and unnecessary to litter your paragraphs with sentence fragments when they're not really enhancing the voice or the prose.

Still, I was moved by this book. I read most of it on a long flight and I had to struggle not to cry audibly a couple times. ( )
  LibrarianDest | Jan 3, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 268 (next | show all)
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.
 
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Epigraph
"Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the art of living." -Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Dedication
First words
It happened for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon, a warm spring day in the flatlands near Hollywood, a light breeze moving east from the ocean and stirring the black-eyes pansy petals newly planted in our flower boxes.
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It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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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).

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