Skip to main content

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender

★★★★
I loved it.  Love, love, loved it.  The narrator, a girl named Rose, can taste the emotions in food.  Any book that starts with an usual idea like will have to try hard to screw it up.  Aimee Bender does the opposite.  She turns it into a tremendous story, not just of Rose, but of her entire family.  Her brother and father, who have their own strange powers, her sort of love story with her brother's best friend, her mother's affair.  The central fantastical premise becomes a lens through which the story of an otherwise normal family is told.

The writing is lively, the characters are sympathetic, and the story moves at a pace fast enough to keep you interested.  I also like that you root for Rose, not because she's special, but because she's likable.  

One of my favorite parts of the book was when she discovers her ability, she performs a series of experiments to find out if what she's experiencing is real.  She tests foods.  She learns about the different flavors of individual foods (factory processed vs. farm grown) and about the feelings of the preparers.  It was a really interesting perspective.  It was almost like we have a first person limited narrator, but she gains a certain omniscience by her ability.  

Aimee Bender wrote some other books, and they're definitely on my reading list.

This book addresses the Foodie Challenge, and the 100+ Challenge.
Labels:

Comments

Jessica said…
This is the book I set aside for you but forgot to give you when you visited. I read it and enjoyed it well enough, but I had the sense while I was reading it that you would really love it. The brother parts bothered me, but I enjoyed the main character's relationship to that little restaurant towards the end of the book.
May 22, 2011 at 10:22 PM
Denise said…
Jessica, you know me so well. :)
May 22, 2011 at 11:01 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alie & Georgia are lushes.

Last night I hosted an Alie & Georgia cocktail birthday party. We went from 8 to 2 and tried 8 different cocktails. There was also ice cream cake and a hookah bc, well, I throw good parties, and Jeremy deserves nothing less. There would have been a fire pit, but something, something sleet. The fact that we only got to try 8 means there can be more Alie & Georgia parties in future bc there are so many left!  I would have included more pictures, but we were, uh, too distracted to take them.  And now, a review: Drunken Donuts Our first cocktail of the evening, I decided to serve these as little shots with a Spudnut garnish bc they are 2 parts alcohol to 1 part coffee. They contain staggering quantities of espresso vodka, coffee liqueur, and chocolate liqueur. A shot was about as much as you need, despite the recommended serving of a mug! of the stuff. This was our first hint that Alie & Georgia must be lushes with liver related super powers.  On a side note, these were
3 comments
Read more

2011 Reading Challenges

On the first day of this new year, I am pulling together the reading challenges in which I want to participate.  There are so many that sound interesting that I'm not doing, particularly a bunch of them that are regional authors, which I'm trying to cover with my Global Reading Challenge.  I've chosen a bunch of them, but the problem won't be reading quantity, but more like reading strategy.  I read 3 or 4 books a week and most of these challenges allow crossovers, so I see no problems reading enough books, merely reading the right books and then, perhaps more challenging, writing about them, which some challenges require, and some only suggest.  Either way, it's a neat way to prioritize reading for the coming year. The Challenges in Which I Shall Participate Southern Literature Challenge - I've never read enough Southern Lit, and while some of the newer stuff is truly awful, I'd like to explore some older books. It's any book set in the South by a S
4 comments
Read more

The Land of Lost Things

I met my new therapist last week.  I test drove a few, and she was the one that stuck.  She seems like she's not going to let me get by with any bullshit, and she said a couple of things that zinged me in our very first meeting.  That was unexpected, delightful, and now, with time to think about it, terrifying. I've been doing so much soul searching lately, so much careful consideration of my life and where I am - you'd think I'd be finding myself, but instead I feel so completely lost.  A few reasons: 1. I sabotage relationships in a really predictable way.  I had always thought of this behavior in one way, but with one sentence, this woman last week made me question everything I thought about that.  It's good to question it; it's what I wanted, but to be confronted so quickly by something that I had never considered is frightening.  I've spent so much time trying to figure this stuff out, and it turns out that I've been so completely wrong about so
6 comments
Read more