±1±: Now is the time The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $15.17
Date Created : Jul 19, 2010 03:21:10
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
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.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle).
±1±: Best Buy Aimee Bender's prose is the right recipe to transport you. Rose is needy, neglected and has a special skill, she can taste people's emotions in the food they cook. She first discovers this in her mother's lemon cake and soon eats only processed foods. The extended metaphor allows Bender to reveal the intricacies of family life and Rose's struggles in adolescence and young adulthood, finally applying this talent and learning to cook for herself and others. For me, Bender's magical realism is less successful in her brother's special talent, but it serves as a crucial plot point. A recommended read. on Sale!
±1±: Now is the time Kings of the Earth: A Novel Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $13.00
Date Created : Jul 06, 2010 02:57:08
Following up Finn, his much-heralded and prize-winning debut whose voice evoked “the mythic styles of his literary predecessors . . . William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Edward P. Jones” (San Francisco Chronicle), Jon Clinch returns with Kings of the Earth,a powerful and haunting story of life, death, and family in rural America.
The edge of civilization is closer than we think.
It’s as close as a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, where the three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis. They linger like creatures from an older, wilder, and far less forgiving world—until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder.
Told in a chorus of voices that span a generation, Kings of the Earth examines the bonds of family and blood, faith and suspicion, that link not just the brothers but their entire community.
Vernon, the oldest of the Proctors, is reduced by work and illness to a shambling shadow of himself. Feebleminded Audie lingers by his side, needy and unknowable. And Creed, the youngest of the three and the only one to have seen anything of the world (courtesy of the U.S. Army), struggles with impulses and accusations beyond his understanding. We also meet Del Graham, a state trooper torn between his urge to understand the brothers and his desire for justice; Preston Hatch, a kindhearted and resourceful neighbor who’s spent his life protecting the three men from themselves; the brothers’ only sister, Donna, who managed to cut herself loose from the family but is then drawn back; and a host of other living, breathing characters whose voices emerge to shape this deeply intimate saga of the human condition at its limits.
±1±: Best Buy With this second novel, Clinch has established himself as a gifted storyteller of rural American life. Like Faulkner and McCarthy, he exposes the underbelly of the dispossessed with a nihilistic, gothic, and poetic style. Like Steinbeck, he portrays the marginal class pedigrees with compassion and wry social observance.
Finn, the author's first novel, was a fictional biography of Huck Finn's father--a savage, twisted man who bears no similarities to Twain's Pap. I was hooked from the merciless opening sentence to its ruthless last pages.
Clinch's new novel shares some of the same themes, characters, and features, such as a disenfranchised cast of people, a whiskey still, a house with a broken spine, a blind man, and a riverine terrain. This story is inspired by the true history of the Ward brothers of Munnsville, New York and the subsequent documentary, "My Brother's Keeper." Researching it on Wikipedia after I read the novel was a helpful complement to the story.
Three elderly brothers--Vernon, Audie, and Creed Proctor--live together on a dilapidated (that's an understatement) farm in upstate New York. One morning, on arising, Vernon is found dead in the bed he shares with his brothers. The investigation of his death in 1990 is the central subject matter of the story, which spans from 1932-1990.
Told in a chorus of voices in short chapters (sometimes one sentence, sometimes a few pages), the narrative alternates from one character to another, like a non-linear chronicle. The title of each chapter or heading is a character's name. These include the three brothers; their parents, Lester and Ruth; their sister, Donna; her husband DeAlton, and son, Tom; their neighbors Margaret and Preston; and law enforcement officer, Del Graham, as well as a smattering of others. Unlike the strictly third person POV used in Finn, the voices fluctuate between first and third person here. The reader is given back story and secondary plot through the eyes of the various voices, and the tension builds gradually as the links connect between past and present, between neighbor and kin, and between outsiders and inhabitants.
Clinch evokes an earthy, bleak sense of place in the farm settlement of Carversville, with its convoluted web of sinister and complex family dynamics. The grime-encrusted film that covers every skin and surface is so convincing that I could fairly smell the reek of filth saturating the story. He also provides some graphic scenes of the Proctors' agrarian life, including a mishap of ice fishing and the slaughter of a pig, scenes that made me dizzy from its ferocity and immediacy. He strikes a taut equipoise between brutal and beautiful, lashing and lyrical.
There are conspicuous blemishes with the alternating viewpoints--the voices are not entirely consistent to character. The three brothers are illiterate, atavistic, and largely inchoate to others, especially Audie. When referred to by other characters, the reader perceives correctly their boorish and uncouth traits. However, when they spoke, they articulated with too much range, reflection, and harmony, which contradicted what we already knew about their natures and did not successfully differentiate them from other narrators.
In a pointillist construction, it is detracting when several narrators lack distinction. It created a static energy, particularly in the first half of the novel, when the reader is getting acquainted with the cast. The ensemble ran together despite the chapter identification. But when Clinch uses third person narration, it is impeccable. He isn't trying to be colloquial. That is when his prose soars and I felt the immediacy of events and surroundings.
Despite these structural flaws, I recommend this novel for its powerful atmospherics and compelling story. I look forward to Clinch's third novel.
