Change Your Game: Alicia Burden Reviews 'The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake' by Aimee Bender
This series of book recommendations aims to inspire readers to pick up a book they wouldn’t normally read. Perhaps they are slightly out there, or were discovered in an unusual way. In the first submission to the Change Your Game series, Alicia Burden reviews The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.
Image by Honey Fangs from Unsplash
A few days before Rose’s ninth birthday, her mother presents her with a chocolate-lemon cake. When Rose, unable to wait for the cake to cool, pops a warm chunk into her mouth, something shifts inside her. She tastes things that don’t belong in a lemon cake, that don’t belong in food at all. Rose feels sadness and despair in the mouthful of cake, feelings which undeniably belong to her mother. From that moment, Rose’s life changes, and she is forced to carry a heavy secret- she can taste the creators' emotions in any food she eats. From then on, she swears off homemade food, and sticks to factory processed snacks from vending machines, at least then she can only taste the empty, metallic flavours of machinery.
But despite her best efforts to avoid the sorts of foods infused with human emotion, she can’t get away from her mother’s cooking, particularly the sit-down family dinners. Eventually her skill illuminates the secrets in her own family- she finds out about her mother’s adultery while eating a slice of roast beef, and from that point on secrets unravel themselves fracturing Rose’s perception of her family. Why has her father got such a crippling fear of hospitals? And what about her brother, where does he always disappear to?
Eventually Rose discovers that her brother has developed his own secret skill, and once again another layer of Rose’s innocence sheds away. But while Rose’s ability forces her to acknowledge the reality of her imperfect family, her brother’s allows him to drift so far from them all that he risks spinning dangerously out of control.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is written in a way that is so grounded in reality that you begin to question whether the magic that swirls through it is present in our world after all. Rose is brought to life with her accurate childlike wittiness, which Bender successfully develops throughout the novel into an understanding of the dark and confusing reality of the world as she sheds her innocence. Rose’s relationship with her family shifts, naturally, with this loss. However, even as Rose slips away from her family as secrets are revealed, the love she has for them always draws her back.
Bender manages a seamless blending of what's real and magical through the delicious description she uses throughout the novel, particularly when it comes to food. She combines the tastes we all know and the emotions we all feel, and casts them together into a spellbinding combination. However, she doesn’t linger and only uses Rose’s unique taste to develop a character or push the plot on to a heart-warming ending.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a magical realist novel which is heavy on realism and keeps the magic subdued. Bender uses subtle magic to tell a quiet story which does not analyse human nature on a societal scale, but a familial one. It is a story about how a young girl grows up to learn about and accept the imperfections in her family that were so perfectly hidden for most of her childhood. It captures a universal experience of growing up and losing an innocence which will never come back.
Words by Alicia Burden