Aimee Bender

A sci-fi-fantasy family-relationships novel that follows Rose from being eight years old until her early twenties. She finds she has a gift/superpower/curse of being able to taste the emotions of whoever has made a meal to the extent of being able to place the factory where a processed food is made. For a young girl this is a disturbing superpower and she struggles to find food bland or fresh and untouched enough to be edible. Her brother, meanwhile, seems to have the ability to disappear. Her parents are often absent too and she is negotiating life without much guidance. It is an intriguing novel. I struggled to engage with the characters much. George is the sympathetic friend and seemed a good person and the owners of the French restaurant where Rose finds somewhere she can be are too.… (meer)

Was totally disappointed with this book. I feel like the time I spent reading it was wasted. I had thought it was a coming of age story about a little girl who could taste the cook's emotions in the food she ate. For example, she could taste her mother's unhappiness in a slice of cake, or once at a bakery, she could taste the anger in whatever it was she was eating that day. It sounded like an interesting idea to me which prompted me to try the book.

I ended up really disliking this book. It went way beyond the charm of a child tasting unhappiness or love or anger when she was able to idenitfy eggs as organic or cookies as coming from a factory in a specific part of the country. Spoiler alert ... if you plan on reading this book, stop reading this now.

The character of the girl had promise; but the rest of the family was a dysfunctional mess. It was hard to care about any of them. When it turned out the strange brother had "magical" qualities too, it was a bit much. Was I supposed to figure out that he would disappear into furniture because he enjoyed taking splinters out of his mom's fingers? Too odd for me.
… (meer)

No closure. This book gives you no closure.

But it does give you an experience. If you are willing to suspend your disbelief and your critical voice, if you are willing to jump in and take the ride, in return Aimee Bender gives you the experience of being the emotionally neglected child in a family of individuals too consumed with their own problems.

See, Rose has little interior emotional life she can tell the reader. She has little interior emotional life she can tell herself. And no one in her family is listening– much less knows how to teach her to navigate her own emotions. Or life, for that matter.

So when she starts being able to taste the feelings of those who make her food, whether her mom in the family kitchen or the individual in a far away factory, she's in real trouble. This skill/gift/talent/curse would be nearly unnavigable for a child in a supportive family; it would be confusing and overwhelming for an adult with some sense of self.

But for the younger child of a family who already has a child who has extra needs, and for parents who themselves cannot navigate their own lives separately or together, tasting the emotions of others in your food means you are utterly screwed.

It's not in a "Like Water for Chocolate" way: the romance of food, and the enjoyment of life even when it's horrible.

It's more in the line of my-food-is-trying-to-kill-me.

And following the story of what a person has to do to herself to survive under those circumstances isn't done with a narrator with a full, functional voice. It's done in the voice of someone who has hollowed herself out, stripped away parts of herself so she can perhaps survive. The amount of heartbreak in this book is not for the faint of heart: by the last few scenes I was sobbing so hard I thought I would throw up. A feel-good book this isn't; no redeeming Nick Hornby moments here. Bender has written in such a masterful way that she creates the hollowed-out, desperate, needy feelings in this reader as in her protagonist.

I was willing to take the ride: by the third or so chapter I recognized something true about it, as the younger child of an extra needs sibling. Once I waded into it, which was pretty slow going to be honest, I couldn't stop reading. I was drawn from chapter to chapter with Bender's promise of filling that hollowness or neediness with Something. Anything. Please! God! It reminded me of Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Murakami) in this way, pulling me from chapter to chapter as I sought to resolve the same hollowness and confusion in me-as-reader as in the protagonist.

It's a promise she never fulfills and a hollowness never filled. It's never filled for Rose, either.… (meer)