|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
"Odd and oddly beautiful....moving"--The Washington Post
"Haunting....Bender's prose delivers electric shocks....rendering the world in fresh, unexpected jolts. Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange"--People Magazine
"Charming and wistful....[Bender] harness[es] her exquisite, bizarre sensitivity, in this haunting examination"-- The Atlantic
Bender is the master of quiet hysteria....She builds pressure sentence by sentence.....the crippling power of empathy"--Los Angeles Times
"[A] transformative narrative....powerful"--San Francisco Chronicle
"Extraordinary.... a complicated novel with significant emotional heft....The delicacy with which Bender captures Rose’s tastes makes this not just a deeply felt novel but one of the most inventive pieces of food writing in recent memory."--Time Out New York
"The fairy-tale elements in her writing, far from seeming outlandish, highlight the everyday nature of her characters' flaws and struggles. In Ms. Bender's stories and novels, relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities."--Wall Street Journal
"Bender has guts,,,,Rose is an irresistible narrator: warm, witty and sharply observant....quirky, unpredictable voices will surprise and entertain readers....a superb stylist. While acknowledging the dark, she maintains an exuberant, life-affirming attitude."--Miami Herald
"Plenty of plot surprise, as well as numerous insights into character....beauty of the author's prose, which is both straighforward and unusually sensuous....my guess is that this novel will be one of the year's highlights. Intense and compelling, it explores familial love in an unusually idiosyncratic but nonetheless convincing manner, and I find that I'm still thinking about Rose [the novel's protagonist] days after finishing the book."--Portland Oregonian
"Dreamy....Playful prose....one of the most pleasant books we've read all year"--New York Observer
"A funny, haunting, hurting, coming-of-age story"--Christian Science Monitor
"Original and revealing....unique style--part magic, part clean prose"--Denver Post
"[Bender is] a treasure: a modern fabulist drawn equally to the magic and the realities of contemporary life.....gets the details right....rich and fully alive"--Philadelphia City Paper
"Bender is exceptionally good at what she does.....simultaneously appealing to imagination, emotion, and intellect....the power of her writing lies in the contrast between her spare, measured sentences, and the limitless metaphorical possibilities those sentences describe."---Portland Mercury
"Bender spins this tale of magical realism with her familiar darkness....haunting....sticks with the reader long past the final page....moments of quiet brilliance"--Wisconsin State Journal
"One has to admire Bender's originality and her ability to produce stories that make one grateful fro being ordinary."--Detroit Free Press
"[Bender] writes sentences that make the senses take flight....wonderfully strange....dazzling and remarkably precise, both sensual and exacting....makes reality itself magical"-- The Courier-Journal
"wacky stew of alienation and contradiction....unraveling family secrets as strangely lucid as they are nightmarish. At its core, Aimee Bender's novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake encourages us all to make the most of our unique gifts while still finding a way to live in the so-called real world"--O, The Oprah Magazine
"Bender's writing is deep and textured"--Star Tribune
"High-hearted and soulful.... weaves elaborate surreal elements....sets up her central metaphor brilliantly"-- NPR.org
"Taking her very personal brand of pessimistic magical realism to new heights (or depths), Bender's second novel....carreens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses.....[Bender] emerges as more a spelunker of the human soul....plumbs an emotionally crippled family with power and authenticity....brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent."--Publishers Weekly
Willful Creatures
“[Bender] is Hemingway on an acid trip; her choices are twisted, both ethereal and surprisingly weighty . . . Terrifyingly lovely.” —Los Angeles Times
“To curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place” —Entertainment Weekly
“New, exciting, harsh, rugged, and unyielding . . . Every sentence in [Willful Creatures] is a fresh surprise.” —Washington Post
An Invisible Sign of My Own
“Intelligent and engaging . . . [A] fanciful and original take on the quietly helter-skelter world that lies within.” —New York Times
“An achingly idiosyncratic story . . . rendered . . . with eloquence, hilarity, and ominous precision.” —Boston Globe
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“Makes you grateful for the very existence of language” —San Francisco Chronicle
“From cleverly comic to starkly surreal, Bender’s audacious characters surprise and delight. Sometimes, they even make you weep.” —Boston Globe
Product Description
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).
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
So disappointed,
By Dr. Sue (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel (Hardcover)
I really was fascinated by the premise of this book. I read multiple other reviews, many negative, on book club websites and was thus hesitant to buy it, but decided to go ahead. Unfortunately, this book is a mess and went nowhere. I have a feeling that Aimee Bender was trying to emulate the kind of world that Audrey Niffenegger did so well in The Time Traveler's Wife, and somewhat less successfully in Her Fearful Symmetry, but unfortunately she simply didn't succeed. I won't give too much away for those who go ahead, but I suspect that a lot of people who read this book will be just as baffled as me.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Magic little read...,
By
This review is from: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel (Hardcover)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender is a book I've been looking forward to reading this summer.
Rose has never stood out. At school, she has just the one friend. At home, her father is loving, but distant, unable to fully interact with his children. Her brother Joe removes himself from as much of life as possible, preferring to be alone with his scientific formulas. Her mother is like a hummingbird, flitting from one interest to another, always in motion. When she is nine, her mother, who loves to cook, makes Rose a chocolate lemon cake. The taste of the ingredients are there, but Rose is shaken to discover that what she inexplicably finds is: "...the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache..." She tries to explain to her mother, the school nurse and the doctor - and it's all brushed away with reasonable explanations. The only one who does take her seriously is her brother's only friend George. It's not a one time occurrence. Rose now tastes the feelings and emotions in any and all foods. She is able to identify the origins of any ingredient. She survives by mostly eating mass produced junk food from the school vending machine. When she is twelve, she tastes a secret in her mother's dinner - one she doesn't want to know. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is utterly original and absolutely captivating. It's the story of Rose - a character I fell in love with. Her attempts to understand what is happening, her acceptance of it and efforts to have a regular life all tugged at me. But it's also the exploration of dysfunctional family relationships. Joe frightened me and I found his part of the story somewhat disturbing. Dad was a sad, touching character. Mom - well, I know she loved her children, but I just couldn't warm up to her at all. well. I really enjoyed the characters introduced at the end and think there's a story there as well. I think readers are either going to love this book or hate it - the magical realism may turn some readers off. You have to suspend disbelief to become fully immersed in the story. I loved it - it reminded me of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time crossed with Addison's The Sugar Queen.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Amazingly Well Written, Quirky Read!,
By
This review is from: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Paperback)
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, I mean the cover is a pretty combination of yellow and aqua...happy colors. And yes, I know what they say about judging a book by its cover, but I do it all the time. I love aesthetics, so the cover is often the first thing that catches my eye, or that makes me keep walking past a book in the book store. Once the cover has my attention, I read the back cover copy and see if the blurb piques my interest and makes me want to dive into the book. In the case of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it did. In fact, it was the juxtaposition between the super happy color scheme and the copy on the back coupled with, what I’ve gotta say was a damn interesting sounding story.
Aimee Bender tells the story of Rose Edelstein who, as the story begins, is about to turn nine years old. Rose is excited to taste the delicious smelling lemon birthday cake that her mother has made her from scratch for her big day, but upon tasting it, Rose realizes that something is very wrong. What should have tasted sweet and lemony, instead tasted of despair. Rose could taste everything that her mother was feeling, all of her unhappiness, in each bite of birthday cake. Rose’s hope that the incident with her birthday cake was a one time phenomenon turns out to be just wishful thinking and as a child she must learn how to make it through life knowing, through taste, exactly how people are feeling. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was an incredibly interesting novel. It coupled what are really sci-fi-ish concepts with a very human story. The emotions that Rose picks up on and how her knowledge of what everyone around her is feeling changes her life is so believably told by Bender that as a reader, you don’t even question the plausibility of Rose’s condition. To me, that’s the true sign of a great work of sci-fi or fantasy (even though that’s not what this book is classified as, it’s much more literary than most genre novels, but it definitely still has some of those elements to it), the characters and their lives have to be relate-able despite any fantastical story elements. I highly recommend giving The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes a really well written, although slightly quirky and more than a little sad story.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
