I don't really have anything specific to talk about this week but I wanted to do a book review that I meant to last time I posted but that post go so long that I actually forgot. That's how bad my memory is. I should link this post to my mom so she can have an example...
I recently read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender which is about a young girl who, just before her 9th birthday, discovers that she can taste emotions in food, specifically those of the person who made it. This, of course, presents loads of different challenges and opportunities [mostly challenges] for Rose who lives in a rather dysfunctional family. I'd like to just mention a few of the things that caught my attention the most when reading this book.
For one, this novel is incredibly depressing. Don't get me wrong, you won't need to go see a therapist after reading it [probably?] but, while things do, in a way, improve for Rose at the end of the book, it is by little means the "happy ending" that you might expect/wish for. Disappointment is a heavy theme in the book, unfulfilled expectations, jarring glimpses from the childhood of a young girl into the ugly reality of adulthood. I'm doing a poor job of explaining this. Let's see. Rose discovers at a tender age a traumatizing truth about her mother that no one else knows and, through the course of the book, she becomes the only family member to know everything about her current family - all involuntarily. You watch Rose develop from middle-grade, to YA, to adult and all the steps of mental processing involved in taking in her "ability." She doesn't want it and she's never happy about it, the story, in a way, is about a handicap, the handicap of too much knowledge.
Another point that got my attention was Bender's use of, for lack of a better term, magic in the novel. It is immediately apparent that what Rose can do is abnormal, various doctor visits and experimentation proves this is an unusual thing. But you also discover that Rose is not the only one who is different. You see through the character of her brother, the reality that affects us all: that trails and challenges, even some things we consider blessings, come in many forms and that we each deal with them differently. Some people muddle through, struggling to understand why, others become completely incapacitated by them, unable to move forward and unwilling to take a leap that might make them great, and still others are consumed by their trials, finding the fight not worth fighting. The latter is one of the most depressing things about the book for me, if you read it, you'll know what part I mean and you may cry as well. Everything is from Rose's perspective and as she never has a close relationship with any of her family, especially her brother, you don't get to know them very well in the traditional sense, but your heart still breaks for them. The writing is just that good.
The feel of "magic" comes through learning that this predisposition to strangeness is a genetic trait, though not one you learn about in school. I was very satisfied with Bender's skill at intertwining the strange with the normal in such a way that it doesn't stand out like a dragon in an office meeting or something like that. You recognize that something is different but her world building is done so well that it folds right in. [For another example of a good use of magic in a non-fantasy story, I highly recommend Sugar Queen.] The whole story is so haunting and believable, despite the unbelievable, that when I saw a documentary-type show on two siblings whose family trauma remarkably resembled that of this book, I actually had to remind myself that they weren't the same people. Crazy : )
Anyway, it's excessively late for a girl who hasn't gotten more than 6 hours of sleep a night in the last week and a half so I'm going to apologize for my badly constructed book review skills and say g'night! Hopefully I'll get my feet back under me soon and return to some semblance of normalcy. Sorry, did I say return? I meant begin to exhibit.
No comments:
Post a Comment