Book Reviews by Michele Filgate

Most foodies will admit that the act of eating can and should be a gustatory revelation for the mouth. Tasting is one of the senses particularly dependent on pleasure. The last thing someone wants is a bitter or disgusting flavor in their mouth.

In Aimee Bender's novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a girl named Rose discovers that she has an unusual palate when she eats a piece of cake her mother bakes for her. Rose quickly realizes she has developed a heightened sense of taste; she can detect people's emotions in the food that they prepare or cook.

Leslie Jamison’s sentences are like electric shocks; her words are sharply defined razors, cutting a line across the heart. Her writing is sorrowful and sexy; absurd and deliciously dark. The Gin Closet is an impressive debut novel.

In The Gin Closet , a young woman named Stella is adrift in the sea of her superficial life in New York City. She works for a high-maintenance inspirational writer, and takes care of her ailing grandmother. Stella is lonely. She’s lonely even when she has sex with a married man. He’s not committed to her as more than a sexual partner, and she’s left to make the decision to have an abortion when he gets her pregnant.

Love can be as fragile as a glass heart. Ali Shaw’s magical-realism infused novel, The Girl with Glass Feet: A Novel , is set on a strange archipelago, St. Hauda’s Land, and follows an unusual couple. 

Midas Crook is a distant man and photographer who sees the world through his camera; so much so that it’s like an appendage of his body.   He meets Ida Maclaird, a girl with a very strange ailment.  Ida’s feet have turned into glass, and she fears that the rest of her body will gradually be transformed.  She has returned to the islands to look for a man named Henry who may or may not have an answer to her problem.

It makes sense that a playwright who naturally works with the difficulties of dialogue as part of his craft would be able to apply those skills to a novel.  Victor Lodato’s first novel, Mathilda Savitch: A Novel , has a lot of things going for it.  He has the too-smart-for-her-own-good young narrator (Mathilda), who is dealing with the death of her older sister.  He has the absent family members who are half-blinded by their own grief.  But most of all, he has voice.  Mathilda’s words spill from the page and capture a mixture of anxiety and recognition like the most gripping monologues manage to do.