The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
On the afternoon of her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein takes a bite of the lemon-chocolate cake her mother has just baked her and tastes, beneath the sugar, an unbearable wave of grief. The cake is a perfect cake, but her mother is desperately unhappy, and Rose can taste it as cleanly as if it were salt. From that moment on, every meal she eats becomes a kind of unwanted confession from the person who cooked it: a sandwich made by a chain restaurant tells her about absent factory workers, a sandwich made by her cheerful father reveals a man hollowing out behind his smile. As Rose grows up and her family quietly comes apart around her, Aimee Bender's quietly fantastic 2010 novel becomes a portrait of a child carrying knowledge no one else will hear, and of the strange survival skills she develops to live inside a house full of secrets.
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On her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein bites into the chocolate lemon cake her mother baked her and tastes a deep emptiness behind it. The book follows Rose from that birthday into her twenties as she lives with the gift, her father's distance, and the secret her older brother Joseph carries.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was written by Aimee Bender and published in 2010. Bender is also the author of An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Color Master.
Yes. The novel follows a 9-year-old girl who can taste the emotions of whoever cooked her food. Aimee Bender's quiet magical realism is her signature mode.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is 346 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a standalone novel by Aimee Bender, not part of a series.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
