SPOILERS AHEAD
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake follows Rose, the narrator, as she grows up, from when she first tastes her mother's feelings in her ninth-birthday cake to young adulthood, where she ends up as a chef trainee. This talent for tasting feelings in food is more of a curse than a blessing, however, prompting her to avoid not just home-cooked meals, but a sense of intimacy with anyone. This turns out to be somewhat hereditary, as Rose learns later: her father and brother are already presented as avoidant in nature--she has few meaningful interactions with either of them until towards the end--her father never sets foot in hospitals, and her brother eventually succeeds in avoiding all human interaction by disappearing, intermittently at first, then later for good. But there's no judgement on Rose's part whether each person's way of dealing with this curse (of sensing others' thoughts and feelings, somehow) is the "right" way. In fact, she seems just content at last to have a special connection to them. Her relationship with her mother, meanwhile, also gets stronger with time after her brother disappears, though there will never be true understanding: her mother, after all, is still hollow inside, and she, too, would rather hide it than have to confront that feeling.Like in many of her stories, the magic of the world--the existence of a sort of emotional telepathy that can be sensed through any part of the body--fits into the narrative, a key facet of the whimsical and haunting prose. The moment when Rose catches her brother half-disappeared gave me goosebumps, and though it wasn't scary per se, it was reminiscent of the quietly scary moments one may remember from a dream--or from reading Goosebumps. Perspective gets a little muddled at times, with a younger voice permeating the point-of-view of an older Rose.
Though Lemon Cake is sprinkled with several common nuclear-family tropes--the depressed homemaker mother, prodigies, workaholic dad, to name a few--they grow organically into their own characters, suiting better to this somewhat unusual story. I also kind of felt that the characters should just get over it, or at least go to therapy--it amazed me that the subject of therapy never came up. It seemed like a logical step, like, maybe something's wrong with their head? The affair storyline never really goes anywhere, and I wonder how Rose's mother kept it under wraps for over five years.
Sentences are often short and blunt, characteristic of someone who's not wordy and tends to conceal emotions. It also makes it easier reading--reading over 50 percent of the book on a bus and 5 hours of sleep, I could not slog through dense paragraphs of ornate prose. The story was often sad in a way, too, with self-imposed isolationism and her family's insularity preventing them from finding a way out of their unhappiness, and closing them off from getting to know new people. Rose's brother, for example, only made one friend in school, and seemed content to just stick with the one. He didn't disappear until after they were separated after high school. The psychological drama that unfolds as a result of this curse is subtle, interpreted by the reader through Rose's sparse narration. The nonexistence of quote marks echoed the deliberately self-reflective tone of the novel. These feelings are pretty exemplary of the American psyche: focus on yourself, or the bubble that you live inside of. Rose adapts to her own curse by turning it into a talent, letting go of the secret and letting others in. She may never be truly happy, but no one ever is, right?
Once you read through the first chapter, Rose's story will have you disappearing into her world. This is a story I will remember for a while. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
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