Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
By Aimee Bender

304 pages
8 hours and 45 minutes listening time

Grade F

Barf. That is one word to totally sum up this book. My biggest issue with this book is that it was read by the author. Normally, I LOVE when an author is awesome enough to read their own books. It really makes them come alive, like with Jim Belushi's Real Men Don't Apologize or with Chelsea Handler's Are you there Vodka? It's me Chelsea. This one though, baby Jesus would have cried. She sounded BORED the whole 8 hours. She never put any feeling into what she was reading, she never tried to make it seem like this was a book worth reading.

After I finished it, I decided to check Amazon for reviews, since I don't read reviews before hand (maybe this book should teach me my lesson), however everyone seemed to love it. I just don't get it. One of the reviews mentioned something about "magic realism" which I don't even know what that means. Maybe it's Na'vi (yes I just made an Avatar reference) for don't read this book.

I don't know. I didn't think there was good character building, and for baby Jesus' sake, she had almost 9 hours to build them. I thought for a minute her brother was going to end up being autistic, or something like that, and it ended up that he just disappeared, or did he turn into a chair or what? I didn't get that part. at. all. And then with the main character tasting the emotions of people through the food they cooked? Weird.

I also had some issues with the characters relationships with her parents and her wanna be boyfriend George. There just didn't seem to be any depth to any of it.

In summary, leave this one on the shelf.

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And let the record stand that I am not a huge fan of Avatar, it just so happened that we were watching the movie tonight because Lucy loves the blue people, and I didn't know how to spell "klingon."

Also, I just want to remind everyone, that this month Eclipse comes out. So I will be re-listening to the whole Twilight series, HOWEVER, only Eclipse will count towards my goal because I have already read the books so many times. And the only reason why I am starting from the beginning, is because quiet frankly, after reading the Bree Tanner book, I really really miss those crazy vamps.

And on another side note (the side note to the side note of the side note), I don't know if I will be able to last until November to re-read the Harry Potter series. I catch myself periodically each week randomly thinking in my head, rapping to LL Cool J's Goin' Back to Cali song "I'm goin' back to Hogwarts to Hogwarts to Hogwarts, I'm goin' back to Hogwarts, na I don't think so."

I am a self-proclaimed nerd. Big time.

2 comments:

Shauna said...

I almost picked up this book today.. Thank goodness I did not!

daddd said...

Me too, I almost got this book, I have been extremely curious about just WHY Cake and particularly lemon cake is sad, but now I will no longer worry........LOVE