The story of an odd family told through the eyes of a young woman who can taste people’s emotions from the food they prepare. This kind of food mind reading is not fun and our hero tends to eat as many manufactured foodstuffs as she can. Machines have no bad feelings to impart on their food.
Author Aimee Bender just drops us into the story and lets us discover along with the young woman what it is like to taste her mother’s sadness and the baker’s anger and the harvester’s disgruntlement. But the girl who can taste people is not the oddest member of her family-that honor goes to her brother, who is a touch mad and has a tendency to leave this plane of reality on a regular basis.
She learns near the end of the book that her grandfather and father also have odd ‘gifts’ but they are pretty meaningless, just as our hero’s gift is pretty meaningless. There was one point where she was working at a French restaurant-doing the dishes, a great use of her unique talents-and the owner is having a wine tasting.
Aha, I think, something is going to happen now. She will taste the wine and become a great wine critic or something. But no, she refuses to taste the wine and instead wants to sit around eating and talking about what she tastes.
In her quest to make the most of the realism of her magical realism, Aimee Bender serves up one boring slice of real life after another. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake wanders around and ends up saying nothing. If there had been a legend of a witch cursing the family at some point, that would have at least explained what the hell was going on. As it is, we see nothing but the suffering and are never given any reason for any of it.
I like odd books once in a while, but this one seemed a little too odd.
