The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender – review
As Rose Edelstein turns nine, the simple task of eating becomes fraught with dread. Biting into her mother's lemon cake, she tastes "absence, hunger, spiralling, hollows", and is shocked to realise that these disturbing emotions emanate from "Mom", belying her happy, fulfilled exterior. Negotiating around sandwiches that yell "love me", and cookies tasting of "tight anger" is bad enough, but Rose's new-found ability as "food psychic" also gives her an unwelcome insight into the lives of those to whom she is ostensibly closest. While her brother Joseph withdraws to the extent that he (literally) becomes part of the furniture, Mom starts an affair, advertised by adultery-flavoured roast beef, and Dad, a lawyer, remains disengaged. Rose's complex relationship with food is developed by Bender as a slightly laboured metaphor for loss of innocence, as the betrayals and uncertainties of an adult world take over. In this quirky, engaging tale of a family endowed with unlikely gifts, the ties that bind people barely conceal the chasms that divide them.