In Books:
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
It’s the rare novel that can live up to a killer premise, those bombshell ideas that get readers’ minds snapping and crackling like crossed wires, so much so that the printed page translation of that idea almost always pales in comparison. We create our own fantasies, after all, artists simply point the way. So to say that Aimee Bender’s (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) crisply dreamlike new novel doesn’t fully deliver on the promise of its central conceit is less of a criticism than it might seem. Bender takes a clever idea and runs with it as well as can be expected, being more focused on how one particular life-changing event affects her protagonist rather than on its repercussions for the wider world. For the latter, that’s why we have science fiction…
Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is on sale now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.
Chris Barsanti 