"The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" by Aimee Bender

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.

It's because of this “gift” that Rose is able to discern that there is a problem in her parents marriage. “I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would likely tell me the same message: Help me, I am not happy, help me-- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.”

Rose's special ability isn't the only revealing aspect of the novel. Bender also introduces a brother who mysteriously disappears with no explanation on several occasions, a boy who is smart and intense but also who seems lonely and distant. He's another person in Rose's life who seems intensely unhappy. “I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.”

Bender infuses her novel with several elements of magical realism. There's Rose's ability to taste what other people are feeling. There's the brother who eventually disappears in quite the surprising manner. There's the grandfather who Rose never met, who as it turns out, had special olfactory skills: he could smell things about a person.

Despite the whimsical elements, Bender's characters are anything but. There's something that's a little heartbreaking about everyone in her novel. A grandmother who is perhaps going crazy keeps sending her discarded furniture and broken possessions to the house. Parents who are stuck in an unhappy marriage where neither one seems to understand each other can't break out of their cycle. And at the heart of it all a confused girl trying to make sense of the world around her, while her own brother keeps fading away.

At one point, Rose gives a presentation to her classmates and talks about why she likes Doritos. She tells everyone how she tastes chemicals, and that the Dorito “asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.”

It's the homemade food that demands Rose to face the present in all of it's complicated, particular, overpowering flavors. The biggest lesson Rose learns is that life isn't always going to go down easy.