Book Club Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

For July, the book for my online book club Kitchen Reader (which you can join too!) was the book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.  The book had been on my wishlist for awhile so was interested to finally to read it.

It turns out this book is a bit of a melancholy book. It had never occurred to me that a lot of the feelings in food could be so sad or angry or complex enough to detect the deeper emotional waters a person might not even realize they have, or that they are suppressing. There were quite a few times that yes, the narration gets wonderfully descriptive as our narrator (not heroine- just storyteller) Rose, traces back exactly where in the world an ingredient comes from, and what the people who had touched that ingredient had been feeling. But, these feelings tended towards the kind you wish you didn’t know, the kind that Rose describes as being forced to read everyone’s diary with any bite. This ranges from the empty loneliness of her mother to a sandwich yearning desperately for the love of her boyfriend to the real sadness of the school lunchlady or orange juices from oranges plagued with financial worries or maple syrup from a family with drug and alcohol addiction issues.

It isn’t until much later in the book, when she is beginning her young adulthood (the other main ages covered are when she turns 9 and then at 12 and 17 years old) that she grows into letting her curse become something she uses to willingly explore and experience the variety of complicated interior human emotions rather than something she hides from via processed food or eating on the side of her cheek. I laughed at one point as she excitedly describes eating frozen dinners that were the greatest hits by her favorite factories.

If you are reading this book you should expect that her ability is touched upon as an undercurrent of the main story, as it is something she just learns to live with and she doesn’t recognize it until the end as anything positive.

Instead, most of the book is really about this family of four, each person having a secret that is told through the course of the book that explains a little about why no one seems happy in this family – starting with the flighty mother, then sensitive Rose, her very barely there aloof brother (his part of this tale is incredibly confusing and probably why some people may not enjoy this book), and then in what seemed the most realistic, the brief door opening and closing of her very self-controlled, restrained father.

Nothing is really resolved or explained, and we stay in Rose’s perspective which can be both incredibly observant and other times not ask or wonder at all of some things that were to me, frustratingly vague or passively unquestioned.

Fortunately, there is a lot of wonderful imagery in the book, and that storytelling  and lovely writing kept me reading. For such an unhappy, distant and emotionally removed family, this is also a world where a block of butter being prepared for a dessert is described as blurring at the edges; where a father wipes a teary cheek and says salt is for meat, a son uses tweezers to remove splinters from his mother’s hands every Sunday and an aloof brother once in a while reaches out to Rose and she narrates “the same way the dessert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then  sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.”

My takeaway from the book: it was ok for me that there were some unresolved parts, particularly to Rose’s brother. There are people and things that happen in life sometimes that really you don’t know the answer to, and having the distant brother sister relationship that they did, I accepted the unfinished and not understood aspect of it. How Rose portrays her parents having this same acceptance though was odd to me, and I was particularly dissatisfied with the lack of responsibility and parenting of a mother supposedly overflowing with love for her children but who barely know them at all. Maybe that’s just part of the mother’s self-absorbed nature.

Somehow it seemed fitting that it was a French cafe that opens Rose’s eyes later in the book  to the way her insight from feelings from food could be a gateway to the world by dining out all over the place. Thinking back, it wasn’t until I was in college that I really was able to have my eyes opened to the incredible flavors that could be out there. Probably most people grow up in families that center around certain preferred cuisine.

I remember the cuisine that opened my eyes and tongue of what might be out there to eat beyond what I had ever imagined- Russian. The rich butteryness of pelmeni dumplings and crispy latkes countered against cold sour cream or applesauce which were better than my beginner level appreciation of potatoes in french fry, potato chip, and mashed potato forms. Tashkent Carrot salad, with its garlicky vinegar tang as something to do with vegetables besides steam, boil, stir fry, or cover with butter in a frozen food tray. Rich stews that had in one spoonful more than any soup from a can or cafeteria had ever given me in terms of complexity.

Do you remember when you had this experience, where you stepped outside the comforts of the flavors you had grown up with and known thus far and realized there was a whole new world out there, like Rose and I did? What kind of food was it?

Are you interested in joining our book club? For our casual online club there is a new book selected for every month, each book is related to food, and members write a review on their blog during the last week of that month. Next on our book list for August is Thomas Jefferson’s Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America by Thomas J Craughwell.

If you are interested in joining, check out the website Kitchen Reader!