The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel by Aimee Bender

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Passage

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“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

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±1±: Best Buy This may be a true vacation reading endeavor. I took this on over the course of a week while visiting Lake Tahoe this summer. I am thankful for the Kindle (not a shameless plug)after seeing the book sitting on the shelf of the bookstore. This is a book that could put you over weight maximum in checked baggage if you decide to pack it.

It is easy to be completely engrossed for the first 2/3 rd's of the novel. Characters are well developed and I felt the connection with them which is a credit to the author. It is more than just another apocalyptic story clone. Science, vampires, government gone bad, survivalist's, commentary on the good (and bad) of the human condition, immortality and the desire that man has to overcome all play out in a sometimes too casual fashion. I wanted the continual tension that this story had an abundance of. When it went missing, it felt a little empty. This was survival of mankind...the ultimate "all in"...the pace could have stayed frenzied and frantic as far as I was concerned and the novel seemed to be at it's best when portraying this world and its characters agonies and struggles...that seems to be the way Cronin wanted the world to be. The waves rise, fall and crest in this story, it's just that the set's are never quite as consistent as you would want them to be (a California metaphor if you will pardon me). It even created an active dialog with my teenage daughter who was debating the relative merits of the Twilight series versus this version of a very dark future, vampires and the not quite so vapid and two dimensional of characters that you can encounter in this genre of literature. I doubt that Cronin was aiming for the casual teen market with this one.

The last 1/3 rd of the novel to me seemed to be a little too much of the set up for the next in the series that we know will be coming. The tale still held form and kept true to itself..it just seemed to wander occasionally to get us on to the next way point. I know that this is a popular and profitable literary construct in this day and age, but, as a reader I want a ultimately satisfying read that stands on its own merits, that makes me want the next book to enhance and extend the story that I enjoyed. I don't want it to just be a continuation to pick up where the last story left off.

Don't get me wrong...I enjoyed this story and the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses. And some of those strengths are in the details and in the engaging characterizations that make this a lengthy novel to take on. A recommendation to read would be easy to elicit from me. Just be willing to understand and push through the inevitable low spots and be accepting of where this story is going to be heading.

Kudos to Cronin for a refreshing and creative take on this genre. on Sale!

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The Passage

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Friday, August 13, 2010

Girl in Translation

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Aug 13, 2010 13:45:09

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

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±1±: Best Buy Tales of an immigrant coming to America and struggling to succeed are abundant, but Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok tells the story of Kim and her Ma as they immigrate to New York City, in the hopes of the American Dream. Kwok tells Kim's story in chapters, made of short cinematic prose that mimic snapshots of a life, and make it easy to get engrossed in the story of Kim and her Ma. Brought over by her Aunt Paula, Kim and her Ma move into a roach-infested apartment, with broken windows, and no heat. Put to work in a factory that pays "per piece," Kim realizes that in order move out the soon-to-be-condemned building she must do well in school. The novel is told through Kim's perspective, and focuses mostly on her experience at school, with teachers who don't understand her Chinese heritage or that she comprehends very little English. As Kim's English improves she advances in school, scoring very high on her standardized tests, much to Aunt Paula's dismay and envy. In addition to Kim's studies, she must help her mother at the factory where she meets her friend Matt. As the two grow up together in the common setting of the factory, they become really close, with their friendship becoming one of the main centerpieces of the novel.

As I was reading this book I was reminded of the films El Norte and Spanglish, both of which detail immigrants experience, the later in particular with a mother/daughter relationship. However while this book has tones similar to these movies, the novel has a completely different tone. The novel starts when Kim is in sixth grade and progresses until she's thirty and with it comes all the subtleties of growing up. Kwok handles this subject matter with maturity and grace as Kim tries to stay true to what her Ma taught her while assimilating into American society and making friends. It is in this method of storytelling that Kim's voice comes through, to the point where I thought I was reading a memoir and not a novel, and found myself having to keep reminding myself that the volume in my hands was a work of fiction. Kim's voice is so present and alive that it felt like she was in the room as I read the book and found myself relating to her, not as immigrant, but as an intelligent student.

Kwok's personable characters and realistic plot make this story come to life and jump off the page with familiar situations and archetypes. Everyone has had that childhood love interest or a friend who was there when no one else was, and its more likely then not that everyone has one relative that they don't get along with. Even though all readers of this text might not be first-generation immigrants, Kwok elegantly explains the life and colloquialisms of a Chinese immigrant.

However rich the characters may be, the one thing that always makes a novel for me, is when I can't predict the ending. As I was reading this book I found myself anticipating a fairytale ending, but Kwok turned it on its head in the last twenty pages and made me happy and sad at the same time. As such, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a delicious and dramatic human story. Readers will be pleasantly surprised to find themselves or someone they know in Kim's personality.

Final Grade: B+ on Sale!

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Saturday, July 31, 2010

[The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake][Hardcover]

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Monday, July 19, 2010

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel

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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).

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±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!

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Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Kings of the Earth: A Novel

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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.

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±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.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel

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Jun 22, 2010 23:34:05

Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl touched a nerve among readers, who identified with the sexual and intellectual awakening of its heroine, a young woman on the brink of adulthood. A moving depiction of the transformative power of first love, Hamann’s first novel follows Eveline Auerbach from her high school years in East Hampton, New York, in the 1970s through her early adulthood in the moneyed, high-pressured Manhattan of the 1980s.

Centering on Evie’s fragile relationship with her family and her thwarted love affair with Harrison Rourke, a professional boxer, the novel is both a love story and an exploration of the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world. As Evie surrenders to the dazzling emotional highs of love and the crippling loneliness of heartbreak, she strives to reconcile her identity with the constraints that all relationships—whether those familial or romantic, uplifting to the spirit or quietly detrimental—inherently place on us. Though she stumbles and strains against social conventions, Evie remains a strong yet sensitive observer of the world around her, often finding beauty and meaning in unexpected places.

Newly edited and revised since its original publication, Anthropology of an American Girl is an extraordinary piece of writing, original in its vision and thrilling in its execution.

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±1±: Best Buy I am a voracious reader, and usually I consume books rapidly. The best way I can describe this book is that it consumed me instead of the other way around.

You will be drawn in to the narrator's mind and hear the story from her innermost thoughts and feelings. You will feel her frailty, her anxiety, as well as her sucesses. The stream of consciousness is crafted expertly. Within the first page you will feel consumed by "Evie" and will not be able to put it down.

The quality of the writing is absolutely wonderful. This book feeds the intellect and the soul, but be warned -- if you like "fluffy" books and literature that is primarily plot driven, this may not be the book for you. If you can't / don't understand Faulkner, you probably won't appreciate this book either. on Sale!