The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
It was hard to decide which book to cover this week–new fiction came out from Ann Beattie, Jennifer Egan, and the late Henry Roth–but Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake stood out as a unique, emotionally engaging novel that’s been racking up good reviews since its release last week. Bender (author of An Invisible Sign of My Own and story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures) is well known for her surrealist fiction. In The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, the protagonist–nine-year-old Rose Edelstein–can taste the emotions of whoever made her food. She first notices her unique talent when she tastes a sad, hollow feeling in a slice of her mother’s lemon cake. In the coming years, Rose must learn to live life while being bombarded with others’–especially her family’s–suppressed emotional baggage. According to critics, Bender perfectly weaves Rose’s strange gift with the hyperreal, southern California setting to create an impactful, imaginative novel.
“Bender is the master of quiet hysteria. At times, it seems almost cruel, like she uses her talent to create anxiety willfully. She builds pressure sentence by sentence.” – Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“While Bender delivers plenty of plot surprises, as well as numerous insights into character, my chief pleasure in reading the book was the beauty of the author’s prose, which is both straightforward and unusually sensuous.” – Steve Yarbrough, The Oregonian
“Bender transforms what seems like a beguiling premise for a quirky short story [...] into a complicated novel with significant emotional heft.” Eryn Loeb, Time Out New York
“In her gloriously intelligent and poetic second novel, [Bender] pairs her trademark imaginative leaps with a sensually vivid realism.” – Jane Ciabattari, Barnes & Noble Book Review
Read an excerpt from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake in NPR’s review.
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