COVER STORY

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

For When: You've eaten your feelings

by Katherine Hill

Published: Jun 16, 2010


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Aimee Bender may test the limits of quirk, but she's a treasure nonetheless: a modern fabulist drawn equally to magic and the realities of contemporary life. The heroine of her latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, can taste people's emotions in their food. Do they yearn for love? Are they always late? Rose can tell, a talent she discovers just before her ninth birthday, when a slice of cake reveals that her beautiful, creative mom feels small, distant and hollow — all of which is too much for Rose.

Bender's cute premise works because, as any recovering picky eater knows, the pure stuff (apples and carrots) and the processed stuff (chips and candy) are for many hypersensitive kids the only palatable foods. At the same time, we know that many a woman has swallowed her sadness to cook something up for her kids. The notion of food being tainted by grown-up pain is of course fantastical, but for the most part, Bender gets the details right, making her fable easy to believe.

As Rose comes of age, food is her gateway to the adult world, which Bender treats with élan. A big brother's popcorn is "a puffy salty collapsing death," while holding a boy's hand makes Rose look at apartments "with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgundies and matte reds." In this tale of sensory overload, the five senses are, as they should be, richly and fully alive.

Doubleday, 304 pp., $25.95, June 1

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