Matter of Taste
Like the mix of ingredients used to make the titular dessert in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender’s novel is a blend of old-fashioned coming-of-age story and newfangled horror tale that becomes a less-than-satisfying confection about love, loss, and lunacy, and what they taste like in the preternaturally sensate mouth of one little girl. Bender, author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) and Willful Creatures (2005) and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), continues to explore a predilection for a kind of American-gothic postmodern realism