Friday Finds

Another fun book meme care of Should Be Reading.

What great books did you hear about / discover this past week?

Book Blurb: From nationally acclaimed political commentator and multimedia personality Farai Chideya comes an intense and darkly funny debut novel about a woman who learns what you stand to gain—and lose—if you follow your dreams.

Sophie Maria Clare Lee is no stranger to reinvention. A book-smart black girl from blue-collar Baltimore, she remade herself into a Harvard hipster, and finally into an indie rock musician touring America with her mesmerizing classmate (and now ex-husband) Ari Klein.

Now, ten years after graduation, a one-night musical reunion with Ari spurs Sophie to snatch back the mic. She lands a record deal—with the help of new manager and paramour Leo Masters—but quickly discovers that her celebrity status brings new risks for her sense of self and even her safety. As she and Ari play music together again, a complicated love triangle begins. With a Greek chorus of advice from her two best girlfriends, Sophie tries to figure out how she relates to these two men, the music business, her loving but demanding extended family, and her penchant for alcohol and melancholy. As the band tours the world, will Sophie’s faith, family, and friendships crumble under the weight of her dogged fight for fame?

Book Blurb: 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).