This book has a wonderful theme that just reminds the reader that people are all never what they appear and one can tell the thought and actual feelings of a person through their appearance and what they choose to show to themselves to the world. This is an interesting thing to consider in this book and was interestingly interpreted into the book through the circumstances of the main character throughout the story. She finds that the mother that she thought was happy with her life and her children was depressed and was desperate to somehow escape her life at that moment and yet, to the rest of the world who could not taste exactly what she was feeling through her cooking, she was a very happy looking person.
The main character, Rose Edelstein, becomes slowly more and more depressed once she starts tasting their feelings in what they cook for her. She realizes how much of the world are not what they appear and how many of her family, friends, and strangers from restaurants are really unhappy with their lives. This is a view of the world that the author seems to have, of very few people being truly happy no matter how they appear gives the book a slightly dark tone to it, and the book describes how the main character can at first not accept this and deal with it, but then eventually finds a way to ignore the sadness in her birthday cakes and dinners until she grows up and moves out her parents home.
Rose’s relationships with the rest of her family are interesting. SInce she doesn’t normally talk to anyone, her friends or her family, she continues to do that and doesn’t confront them about their mother’s life outside their home, her father’s detachment and silence toward the family, and her brother’s isolation from the world. No matter what their issues are, they are all in denial. When Rose finally tastes some food she cooked herself, she says that it tastes like a factory, cold machine tinge, and nostalgia, for a time before she could taste her family’s problems or her mother’s affair.
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