Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

7% finished: A six year old has an allowance? A six year old saves up this allowance? A six year old uses these savings to buy a professional-grade dental pick from their local dentist? What the fuck. If this was set in the 1950s, or possibly in a country outside the US, this could maybe be believable, but a few years ago a woman in South Carolina was arrested for letting her 9 year old go to the park alone. This book is about tasting the emotions of others in the food they make, and that concept is more believable than a six year old buying a dental pick.

I'm going to keep reading this book, but it has taken a huge hit with this ridiculousness. We'll see if it can come through....

Ok, I finished the book. I'm glad I kept going because the book picks up the pace, and the author takes some risks that I think really paid off.

My big problem at the start of the book was the writing style. It felt like the author wanted the intimacy of 1st person narration while also giving us all sorts of insights into the other characters, but insider detail on that level requires 3rd person narration. This made the writing feel really uneven and broke the flow more than once. My other problem early in the book were several implausible details (see above), and I feel like the editors are partly to blame here. What seems like a charming detail to an author can be so out of place to a reader that it jolts them out of the flow; an editor's job is to find those details and ruthlessly slice them out. The author's editor did her no favors by letting these details slide in this book.

Those are my complaints, here come the compliments. This book is not at all the book I thought it was going to be, it was much weirder and deeper. The story is wonderful at giving a glimpse of something, then looping back to give you the full scoop; sometimes right away, sometimes much later. There are also things left dangling, that are never fully spelled out, and I love when an author trusts the reader enough to do this. And finally the story draws you in, it has that certain pull that a good story has, something more than the sum of its parts. The more I read it, the more I wanted to read it.

So, this book has a rocky start, but it gets good.