The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The week of Rose’s ninth birthday she discovers she has suddenly acquired a very unusual skill. Her mother makes her a lemon cake with chocolate frosting as a practice for her real birthday. When Rose tastes the cake, she can feel all the thoughts and emotions that her mother was feeling when she made the cake. Rose is appalled at how sad her mother is, and she cannot believe how incredibly awful it is to eat that piece of cake. Much like reading minds, being able to sense the feelings of the person who makes her food turns out to be more of a curse than a gift. At first Rose hopes that the lemon cake incident was a fluke, but it happens again with other food her mother makes. Rose asks her brilliant, scientific older brother and his equally brilliant (and more sympathetic) friend for help. Her brother Joseph dismisses her immediately, but his friend George helps her conduct experiments. Together they discover that Rose it not imagining things. Rose’s new skill opens her eyes to many things she had never known or noticed about her family. The more she learns, the more disturbed she becomes. Rose learns how to survive on factory made junk food at school, and suffers through her mother’s cooking at home, eating as little as possible. Rose is also worried that her brother Joseph seems to disappear unexplainably at times. At first the disappearances are brief, but they begin to get longer and longer. Rose searches the house looking for him when he disappears. When she enters his room, she gets an ominous feeling that something is wrong. Joseph always shows up again looking tired and disheveled, but he won’t say where’s he has been. He just says he has been practicing something very difficult. Her mother and her father have their secrets too. The family’s secrets are slowly revealed. Rose eventually learns that she is not the only one in her family who is highly unusual.

My dear friend Tracie recommended this book to me. I can see why. It is beautifully written. The characters are interesting and quirky. It’s thought provoking, and it was such an original story. However, when I finished the book I found myself wishing for a better ending. There are books with many ups and downs that end terribly sadly. I can deal with those books, as long as I don’t think the author forced the ending to be sad just because they thought it made a better story. There are books that are kind of sad that have some sort of uplifting ending. I really like those! This book was kind of strange, then sad, then strange again. On and on it went like that until the ending. I think when I finished it I actually said, “Huh,” out loud. Not “Huh?” like I don’t understand, but, “Huh. That was….what was that?” I was at a loss. Melancholy is the best word I can use for the feeling that I had throughout this book. I was hoping for something to be resolved when it was all said and done, and I just didn’t get that.

There was also something about the book that drove me crazy. No quotation marks! As an English teacher I talked to kids time and time again about the rules of punctuation and why we use quotation marks, but I’ve never read a whole book without them. It was so confusing! After a long piece of plain narration, the dialogue would take me off guard. I would find myself stopping and returning to the beginning of the sentence. “What? Someone is talking now? Who is that? Ugh! Let me start over!” Now when I tell students about using quotations marks I’m going to say it with conviction. I never realized just how useful those silly little things are! I would love to find out why the author chose to do this. I’m sure she had an artistic reason.

Needless to say, I am not going to recommend this book to my friends. I probably won’t read it again, but I’m not sorry I read it. I love the way the author describes things. Sometimes they are minor details that would usually be left out. But she describes them so beautifully that one doesn’t mind the digression. Reading this book was an enlightening experience. I learned a lot about what I want from a story.