The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


  All I can say is...wow. When I first read the back of the book I was like hmm this sounds pretty interesting. Then I find that a book club that is meeting this Sun is reading this book, I went and grabbed on up so I could join..and just wow.
   It all starts on Rosie's ninth birthday, when she bites into her chocolate lemon cake, made by mom, and she tastes all her mother's feelings. You meet her brother Joe is distant from the family, always in his room, and just simply wants nothing to do with Rosie. You slowly find out how sadly dysfunctional and distraught the family is when Joe starts disappearing.
    I felt so sorry for Rosie, who had a mom who always looked for signs from above, and to find out that the sign that lead her to marry the father wasn't really a sign from above....but one the father carried out. To have a father who wasn't really good at the parenting thing. And to have a brother who wants nothing to do with her.
    It drove me nuts about how the mother thinks of Joe when he wants nothing to do with the family. That no matter what he did, in the mother's eyes he could do no wrong. Of course that changed on the last 5 pages when you find out what caused the disappearances.
   This book is just so heartfelt, easy to read and amazingly written. I definitely recommend this book.



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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.