The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

A Novel

By: Aimee Bender

Narrated by: Aimee Bender

Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

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 parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes 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 hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s 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 Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle).

©2010 Aimee Bender (P)2010 Random House

Critic reviews

"Odd and oddly beautiful....moving"--The Washington Post

"Haunting....Bender's prose delivers electric shocks....rendering the world in fresh, unexpected jolts. Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange."--People Magazine

"Charming and wistful....[Bender] harness[es] her exquisite, bizarre sensitivity, in this haunting examination."-- The Atlantic

Don't make the mistake of giving up on this book!

I started listening to this book and at first was very put off by the voice of the author/narrator. I then looked back and read the Audible reviews and found I was not the only one with this initial reaction. Fortunately, my husband encouraged me to 'give it one more commute'. Thankfully I listened to both him and the book for one more day on my trek from Orange County to LA. I soon got hooked, began caring about the characters, the plot and found myself looking forward to getting in my car every day. (Don't tell anyone I said that!) If you have the patience to get beyond the intial slowness of the book, you will be rewarded!

would not recommend

I listened to the book narrated by the author. it was really hard to make it to the end. i am not sure if the story was as bad as I think it was or if the narration made it unbearable for me. I put this on 2 different wishlists over the course of a few years so I thought I would really enjoy it. I kept hoping it would get better but I just never felt a moment where I actually enjoyed the book.

A wonderfully creative and quirky piece of fiction

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, this book is beautiful in its oddness.

What did you like best about this story?

Quirkiness draws me in.

Which character – as performed by Aimee Bender – was your favorite?

The narrator

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Unique gifts difficulty embraced.

Any additional comments?

I like Bender's voice as it seems to fit the narrator's persona.

This was a slog to get through

I really wanted to like this book but found the story and the narration to be drudgery. Maybe it will appeal to others but just it just didn’t hit the mark for me.

Thoughtful novel; clear reader

Unlike other reviewers, I liked the author's reading. She speaks clearly and does not over-act the characters. This leaves more to the listener's imagination and calls more attention to the carefully crafted words. However, I advise other customers to try the audio preview to decide for themselves.

The novel itself is one of the best I've read/heard in the past year.

Particular sadness of reading a disappointing book

The premise seemed interesting, but the development of the story was so slow, so painful, that I lost interest.It took forever to learn that there was more to the story than the girl tasting people's emotions, and if I hadn't been doing something that was really interesting while listening, I think I would have quit. The family's other "skills" hardly showed up until the end. I love description, when it's done right, but in this book, I thought the details were tedious. I do not recommend this book.

Disappointment

Narrator is terrible. Spoke slowly and without inflection in her voice. I had to double the speed to get through the book. The book had interesting nuggets that didn't link to anything logical to keep your interest. Characters were vaguely developed and did not have meaningful interrelationships. The end was unfathomable, indecipherable, and discombobulated. When finished my only thought was huh?

Interesting concept ineptly executed

Maybe it was the author's annoying narration, or perhaps it was the frustratingly inarticulate characters, but I had to force myself to finish listening to this novel. It took me a couple of weeks to complete its 8-plus hours -- the last two hours were excruciating. In contrast, I've completed 22-hour novels in a frenzy of enjoyment over just a few days. This novel is torture.

Long, boring and pointless paragraphs are devoted to stilted dialog marked by the main character's inability to describe to her father and friends what had already been described to the reader. We get it! The people in this family don't talk to each other. They are trapped in their own little islands of secrets, silence and fear. As such, they are not terribly interesting people to spend time with.

What should have been novel's peak -- when the main character's special talent is finally out in the open and she is offered a couple of chances to put it to good use -- falls flat due a rather obvious "duh" plot turn. Ditto for when the brother's "secret" experiment is finally explained (in the last 10 minutes). I saw both coming from a mile away and kept wondering when the protagonist would figure it out. Suffice it to say, this novel left a bad taste in my mouth.

Interesting Premise

Imagine tasting food and having the flavor overwhelmed by the emotions of the preparer. This is the story of a young girl who has this gift (or curse) and the effect it has on her live. It begins when her depressed mother wants her to taste a lemon cake, and each bite is unbearably sad. It is also the more involved tale of a dysfunctional but oddly gifted family. The premise is interesting, but even as fiction becomes very difficult to understand the brother's difficulties. In addition, a reader other than the author may have been able to bring the characters to life, making them more compelling.

The reader ruined the book for me.

Could not even finish the book because of the reader. It may have been a good book but I could never get into it because she was the boring person I ever listened to.