The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

 

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 Help

by Kathryn Stockett

An impressive debut novel set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer. Enlisting the help of two black maids, Abilene and Minny, and eventually many others, Skeeter puts together a book based on their stories working for the white, country club ladies of Jackson. The stories range from tender and poignant to scathing and shocking, but the telling of them brings pride and hope to the black community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, and friends - view themselves and one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope. 

 

Savages

by Don Winslow

Savages pits young marijuana kingpins against a Mexican drug cartel, and offers a provocative, sexy, and thrilling ride through the dark side of the war on drugs and beyond.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet

by David Mitchell

In the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company, a place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken.