Read by Aimee Bender
8 hours, 53 minutes
Published June 2010 by Doubleday
Publisher's Summary:
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother-tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.
The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden-her mother's life outside the home, her father's detachment, her brother's clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.
My Thoughts:
This book has been on my TBR for probably almost since it was published in 2010. At the time it was all over Goodreads so on to the TBR it went. To be honest, I had no recollection what it was about when I found that my library had it on audiobook. To be honest, since 2010, I've developed a much better idea of the kind of books I like and the kinds that don't work for me. Books with things like a magical gift of tasting emotion in food would likely have steered me away from this book had I read the summary before I started listening to the book.
You know how sometimes I tell you that I'm happy I didn't read the summary of a book and get scared off by it or how I'm happy that I pushed myself to read something that's outside of what I normally pick up? I'm sorry to say that this was not one of those times. It's an interesting premise. I just wish it would have gone in a different direction, been more about how Rose was able to use her gift. Instead it's much more about how she learns to stifle it and also much more about Rose's brother, Joseph, the golden child who descends into the unknown. It's an unknown only Rose is first aware of and it will, eventually, tie into Rose's own gift. That felt like it's own story to me.
But let's go back to 2010, when this book was published and Goodreads was all aflutter about it. They weren't alone. Jane Ciabattari, writing for NPR, was impressed with what Bender crafted, as was Susan Salter Reynold, writing for the L. A. Times. So maybe I should have read that summary, passed on the book, and spare you my opinion of this one. Clearly it wasn't for me (at least not at this time) but it certainly has worked for so many others. Perhaps you'd be one of them.
Sounds like the book had a lot of promise, with that premise, but didn't turn out as you had hoped.
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