The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Posted by Merry Mao on November 2nd, 2010
Title: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Author: Aimee Bender
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, June 2010
Summary: This is the type of book you can’t put down once you start it – it’s not because you’re loving it so much, it’s because it’s so complicated, odd, and twisted. The first line of the book “it happened for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon…” sets the stage for this engrossing novel. The author’s narrator is a young girl named Rose. On this particular Tuesday afternoon, when she is turning twelve, the favorite birthday cake her mother makes her suddenly doesn’t seem as good. Rose can taste, to her surprise, her mother’s emotions with every bite. She quickly learns that she can literally taste the emotions of whoever prepares her food, giving her unwanted insight into other people’s secret emotional lives. Rose’s brother and father also possess odd gifts and as we follow this family’s lives from Rose’s third grade year to adulthood we become watchers of a family in distress and the sadness it brings to them.
Recommended by: Nancy, Deputy Town Librarian