'The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake': Bittersweet emotions on the tongue

'The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake'

by Aimee Bender

Doubleday, 292 pp., $25.95

Rose Edelstein is nearly 9 when she bites into the lemon cake with chocolate icing that her mother made for her birthday and discovers she has developed an undesirable skill — she can taste the cook's emotions in every food she eats.

Rose's mother is lost and lonely, and her anguish permeates everything she makes, from rosemary chicken to roast beef. Lunches packed by her mother and meals at home become inedible, and Rose spends her childhood scraping together money to buy Doritos and other snacks from vending machines. One of her favorites is made in a factory where no human hands touch the ingredients or the final product, leaving the chips blessedly blank.

"The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" contains the kind of unconventional and impossible world Aimee Bender introduced in "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt."

While one friend urges Rose to use her ability to become a kind of superhero, she feels afflicted rather than empowered. In one sad moment, she describes being torn between hungry gratitude and envy when another friend to whom she has confessed her skill begins leaving her "extra" sandwiches made by the friend's happy and loving mother.

Gradually, Rose realizes she isn't the only one in her family with an unusual ability. Her brother begins to disappear for short periods and returns looking "like he had been washed and dried in a machine." When he vanishes completely, Rose is the only one who knows where he has gone, but her grief is such that she can't explain to anyone, not even her parents. As bad as her skill is, she thinks, her brother's must be worse.

And if Rose isn't a superhero, Bender clearly sees her as a heroine. The novel sharply contrasts Rose's quiet strength with her parents' weaknesses. The child helps her mother conceal an affair and reminds her father that by avoiding his special skill — which he believes has to do with hospitals — he has lost the chance to help others. Throughout the novel, there is a sense of Rose making the best of things and trying to get by while protecting those she loves.

While Rose finds a kind of acceptance and satisfaction in using her skill to help others as she ages into her early 20s, a sense of sadness and loss lingers through the end of "Lemon Cake." This isn't a novel to be read lightly or that will brighten a day. But one has to admire Bender's originality and her ability to produce stories that make one grateful for being ordinary.