The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

By: Aimee Bender

Published June 1st 2010 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Category: Business

Pages: 292 pages

ISBN: 9780385501125

Description:
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parentsÕ attention, bites into her motherÕs homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her motherÕs emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her motherÑher cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do motherÑtastes 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 hiddenÑher motherÕs life outside the home, her fatherÕs detachment, her brotherÕs 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.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee BenderÕs place as Òa writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of languageÓ (San Francisco Chronicle).