Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cakes takes food writing to a whole new level. A master of magical realism in all of her books, Bender creates a narrator in this novel who can taste emotions in her food--she tastes her mother’s loneliness in a fresh-baked lemon cake and a baker’s anger in his cookie.  The book doesn’t dwell too much on the magical elements--they are a part but not the entirety of the book--and instead focuses most of its energy on a family’s dismantling and re-forming in new and surprising ways. 

To put it mildly, Aimee Bender is interested in magical realism.  Her first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt includes a story about a soldier who comes home missing his lips. In her first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, main character Mona becomes a wonderful elementary school math teacher because she makes numbers come alive for kids.  In her second short story collection, Willful Creatures, a main character tortures his tiny pet man and a woman becomes a mother to potato children. 

Reading Bender’s other works both made me want to buy The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake instantly when it came out in paperback, but also hesitate that she may not be able to sustain the mystical elements in this longer work as well as she did in her short stories.  My fears were unfounded. Novels seem to have more power to pack a wallop than short stories do.  Although her short stories are wonderful, none of them impacted me to the same degree that this book did

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake tells the coming-of-age story of Rose Edelstein.  On her ninth birthday, her mother cooks her a lemon cake with chocolate frosting.  Rose tastes the cake and for the first time, she can taste the emotions of the baker, her mother.  She tastes sadness, loneliness and longing. 

Her ninth birthday was the beginning of Rose’s long and frustrating battle with food. She stocks up on junk food made with factories that had eliminated human touch.  She learns to pinpoint the farms where her beans were shelled and her bananas were picked.  She begins dreading eating her mother’s cooking for fear of what she secrets she will discover next.

Bender does not dwell on Rose’s food predicament, however.  She explores Rose’s relationship with her parents--her ephemeral and loving mother who begins an affair with a co-worker and her father, a detached “normal” man who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the family.  Perhaps most interesting is Rose’s relationship with her brother, a distant young man who truly just needs to be left alone. Rose's relationship, too, with her brother’s best friend is one of the best coming-of-age pseudo-love stories I've ever encountered--he believes Rose's unique gift when she is just a kid and she’ll never stop loving him for it. 

Bender’s book isn’t intimidating for those uninitiated to magical realism.  Rose’s unusual food tasting skills are something she has to grapple with and come to appreciate, but they are no more alienating than a speech impediment or a difficulty with reading.  Bender’s skill is that she can make the magical everyday and extremely accessible.