The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel

Aimee Bender

Jun 2010 · Sold by Anchor

About this ebook

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, 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 cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle).

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Aimee Bender's The Color Master.

Ratings and reviews

⭐⭐ I absolutely loved the premise of this book! However the story fell short for me. My least favorite thing about this book is the number of times the word "said" was used. "She said this" and "They said that". It was overdone, possibly record breaking. I liked the characters and their gifts. I wish those had been explored more. It left me wanting in an unfinished way. I probably will not recommend this book to others. I wouldn't discourage it either. #theparticularsadnessoflemoncake #aimeebender #bookstagram #bookreview #2star #lallahbookreview #readinginlallahland

Silly book using a fairy-tale magic to tell the story about a girl who can read people's moods in the food they cook. Couldn't wait for it to be over....July 31, 2010 on Kindle

The story was amazing but the way Aimee Bender has written and expressed her ideas is simply spell binding and if you want to read a 3/5 story with excellent story telling abilities, I suggest you to read this.

About the author

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake—a New York Times bestseller—and An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.