Just Jennifer

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (Doubleday, June 1, 2010)

Just before her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein learns she has an unusual gift: Rose can taste the emotions of the cook, purveyor or grower of the food she is eating.  Rose tastes an unbearable sadness in her mother’s lemon cake that she realizes is deep inside her mother.  From then on, Rose is afraid of what she will learn by eating and tries to avoid eating home cooked food as much as possible, not wanting to know, not able to understand, her mother’s inner secrets.   As Rose grows through her teenage years, always on the periphery of everything, she senses a change in her parents’ marriage, which had wonderfully romantic beginnings, and a change in her older brother, Joseph, who is having his own difficulties with the world in which he lives.  He develops his own gift, his own way of dealing with reality, one that will bring heartache, and truth, to the lives of those he loves.  At first, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake seems straightforward, but then a magical realism takes over and the reader becomes lost in Rose and Joe’s world, a world filled with secrets, and one that she must choose to learn to live in, or escape forever.