Customer Reviews

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel

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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.

This book was very strange. It jumped around a lot and sometimes I had trouble following it. There was, however, enough interest to finish it. I think it is for a specific kind of reader. I really liked the last sentence in the book, in my opinion, it summarized what the book was about.

"The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" begins, unsurprisingly with a lemon cake. A few days before she turns nine, Rose Edelstein comes home from school to find that her mother has baked her a pre-birthday cake. Biting into a piece, Rose tastes "absence, hunger, spiraling, hollows." The cake contains a message her mother has unknowingly sent, a message Rose cannot digest.

Rose now carries a dark secret; she has a new skill, a sad superpower. She can taste people's feelings in the food they make: anger in a cookie, adultery in roast beef. Slowly, she adapts. Whenever possible, she eats processed food and develops a love of vending machines. When forced to eat her mother's food, she distracts herself from the emotional ingredients by focusing on the material ones. Soon, she can identify potato farms and pasta factories, truck routes and tomato pickers. She can tell a California orange from a Florida orange in less than five seconds. She knows with certainty if a food is organic.

Meanwhile, her family comes into an almost-focus; Rose's skill illuminates those around her just enough to make her feel all the more in the dark. Who are these people? A father, who has such an acute fear of hospitals that his first sight of his baby daughter is through binoculars from the sidewalk below. A relentlessly cheerful mother, who at her core harbours loss and loneliness. And a distant brother who spirals farther and farther away, perfecting a strange skill of his own.

Aimee Bender's book displays a magical cooperation between dream and reality so seamless and persuasive that, upon finishing it, the reader feels utterly awake and unalone.

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.

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.