Revised Literary Essay.

This book, "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" by Aimee Bender has some wonderful themes that just reminds the reader that people are all never what they appear and no one can tell the thoughts and actual feelings of a person through what they choose to show about themselves to the world. This is an interesting thing to consider in this book and was interpreted into the book through the circumstances of the main character, Rose. She finds that her mother, who she thought was happy with her life, was in reality, depressed and desperate to somehow escape her life at that moment. But the only person who knew this was Rose, because 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 the feelings of her family 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 strange chefs from restaurants are really unhappy with their lives. 
This 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. The author 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. She learns to deal with what is both a talent and her struggle, and that makes the book so much more interesting to read. It adds to the conflict and creates plausible and complex problems.

Rose’s relationships with the rest of her family are another reoccurring issue. Since she doesn’t normally talk to anyone, her friends or her family, she says nothing to them about this ability/problem that she has discovered. Rose also refuses to confront them about her 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.
One of the most impressive things about this book is that it has science-fiction or fantasy aspects, but the way that they are used is inventive. When the author created this idea of Rose tasting people's feelings, it only helped reveal and add to the everyday problems that she was trying to deal with in her life. Although this book could not be called realistic fiction, the problems that it deals are real, and that makes the entire story stronger. Dealing with actual, relatable problems, in a world that is not quite real, gives the conflict the real sense of mystery that exists in most science fiction books, but has more complex issues and themes, and gives the mundane problems a sort of mystery that doesn't seem to exist in many other books that I have ever read.
The Un-revised Post: http://tessellenbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/reading-response-for-particular-sadness.html