The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

But the day was darkening outside, and as I finished that first bite, as that first impression faded, I felt a subtle shift inside, an unexpected reaction.  As if a sensor, so far buried deep inside me, raised its scope to scan around, alerting my mouth to something new.  Because the goodness of the ingredients – the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons – seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was beginning to push up from the bite.  I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with 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 that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis to her comment:  I’m just going to lie down…None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness.

Aimee Bender’s novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, is a singular and surreal experience, the story of Rose Edelstein, a girl who, on the eve of her 9th birthday, develops the ability (curse) of being able to taste the emotions of whomever has prepared the food she is eating. The emptiness she tastes in her mother’s cooking so disquiets her, causes her so much pain, that she begins to avoid her mother’s cooking. She’s not safe, though, because now she can taste the rage of the cook at a local restaurant, the longing of the woman who makes the pizza at school. Her talent develops to the point where she can instantly tell whether the spinach she is tasting is actually organic, and whether it was harvested by people who took care with it. As you can imagine, this talent is not one that she enjoys, and it is her coming to terms with it, and with the mysteries and secrets revealed in her family, that is the focus of the story.

I love Ms. Bender’s books, have loved every one of them so far, but I think that this one just might have been my favorite. Rose is a character that is so well written, the story was paced so perfectly, that I had the urge to tear through the book in one or two sittings, and yet, the desire to savor it and to try to make it last just a day or two longer. Highly recommended.