The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: The heartwarming Richard and Judy Book Club favourite
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By Aimee Bender
avg rating
2 reviews
On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the slice. All at once her cheerful, can-do mother tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes perilous.
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This book did not go down very well with the book group, almost everyone disliked it for various reasons. The main reason being confusion with regard to the magical elements. Most of the group felt this was a very odd thing to have in a book, there didn't seem to be much of a point to it. Although the basic idea was very interesting we felt that it wasn't explored in a very substantial way. We were left wondering why things had happened and wondering what we were meant to feel at the end of the book.
The group found the descriptions of the different places the food had come from interesting, however, they did not like the way that the other members of the family showed their magical powers. We were wondering whether these abilities were genetic in anyway, or whether other people in the neighbourhood had any odd abilities. We would have liked to have a bit more from Joseph about his ability and how he felt when he was using it. Whether he had much control over his ability, or whether it just happened to him like Rose.
Overall we gave this book 2 out of 10.
The group as a whole found this book hard to understand as none of us knew what had happened to the girls brother Joseph.
