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

Needy another narrator

The story was interesting, but I had a hard time digging into it because of the author/narrators monotone unemotional voice. Maybe it was meant to be told that way, but I would have preferred some inflection in the character's voices.

The Particular Sadness ofLemon Cake

I enjoyed the book, great story, but would have gotten more out of it if there would have been a different reader. The reader was very slow and lost me several times.

I said, she said, he said

While the story is interesting. It is very hard to listen to. There are SO MANY I,she,he "saids" that it seems like that is all that the you hear

Disappointing....

I so wanted to love this book. What an interesting premise, wonderful material... yet so poorly executed. I agree with previous reviews that this book needed a more attentive editor and a professional reader. (I enjoy autobiographies read by the authors, but otherwise it adds nothing, certainly a very poor choice in this case.) A nine year-old with the entirety of her experience in California cannot possibly imagine fields in Kansas and Nebraska. The author tries very hard to convey the overwhelming confusion of a child trying to cope with adult emotions she is forced to taste and consume, but fails to consistently represent the child's experience and point of view. What a waste. This manuscript was not nearly polished enough to have been published.

Description of Food

I love the writer's description of the food! This book made slow down and savor my food and cook with happy music.

Great story, boring narration

I thought the story was great but the author narrates it and she us very monotone and sounds bored.

Odd but engaging

I know this is a favorite with critics (or at least what I've read) but to me, it was a little bit of a letdown. I had just listened to Shantaram so it was such a slower pace and perhaps I was just not ready for such a leap in tempo. I believe it's read by the author and I really wish the author's would leave the narration to the professionals. The low key voice in this book didn't help. However, I was engaged until all the sudden the book just ended. I realize that a point was made but it was so abrupt that I felt cheated.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I am listening to this book at the moment and am enjoying it. I'm glad I already downloaded it before reading the discouraging reviews as I'm sure they would have disuaded me from choosing this book which would have been a shame. l have favourite narrators but I also like to have variety of content and narration. Take the opprotunity to preview the narrator and give this book a chance.

bad narrating

the narrator was the writer herself, she should just stick to writing, and leave the narrating to the pros. I've listened to more than 20 audio books so far and this is the worst narrating yet, to the point that I am not really interested in listening to it, which is a shame cause the story seem intriguing... I will finish it eventually since I paid for it, but it could have been much better with a proper narrator.

Very, very disappointing.

Mrs. Bender had an intruiging idea: Rose's gift is something very original, and could potentially be the starting point of a great story. The book starts off well enough, although I found it hard to believe that a nine year old girl would have the thoughts and observations that Rose has in the beginning of the book: she just sounds too adult and mature for a young child.

A bigger problem was that right from the start the voice and the rendition of Mrs. Bender annoyed me to no end: she reads the story agonizingly slow, takes long pauses that take any kind of flow out of the narration and her voice is flat, nasal and uninspired. Apart from that, she often stops in midsentence at odd moments, so it seems like she doesn't even understand her own words. She should have never read this book herself, please leave it to the professionals.

The book has some nice moments and touching descriptions of people and their lives. At first it reminded me of "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold, a great story that actually seems to go somewhere and keeps you interested until the last page. The "Lemon Cake" story just seems to have no point whatsoever and when the special "talent" of Rose's brother was revealed, Mrs. Bender lost me completely. It was just too bizarre.

I was determined to listen all the way to the end, to find out if somehow the story would come together, so I struggled on for hours, listening to hundreds of "He said"s and "She said"s until I was totally willing to throw in the towel. Then, seemingly out of nowhere: there was the end, resolving nothing, and leaving me baffled and very, very disappointed.

I can't believe Audible highlighted this book, as if it's one not to be missed. Maybe a marketing trick to get at least some people to buy it, before it was reviewed?