Book Review: Under the Egg

I picked up Under the Egg on a whim at the Los Angeles Festival of Books while I was waiting for my next panel to start. I spent the next two hours turning page after page, pausing only once to change my location from a bench in the unforgiving sun to a cafe table under an umbrella. The jacket description references The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and I find the comparison to be rather apt. Laura Marx Fitzgerald’s middle-grade mystery of forgeries, smuggling, and stolen art is full of the same wonder and larger-than-life adventure that made E. L. Konigsburg’s novel a classic.

Book Review: Killer of Enemies

I’d been eyeing Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac for quite a while. A story of a badass Native American girl in a post-apocalyptic America? Yeah, I could get behind that. Now that I’ve finally read it, my only regret is that I waited so long. This story has all the trappings of a dystopian novel—a vaguely familiar futuristic landscape, regressed technology, an oppressed society cowering under the gaze of a totalitarian government, and unflinching brutality—presented in a fresh light and with a solid helping of scary creatures, gritty fights, and humor.

Book Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Cake has a taste. It’s limited to the mouth. You can taste sour. You can taste sweet. You can’t taste sadness. At least, you’re not supposed to.

In The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Rose Edelstein can. She can taste the emotions of the people who cook her food. In her mother’s lemon cake, she tastes things she can’t even put to words. She tastes “hollow.”

Through her unique use of storytelling, Aimee Bender creates a world where junk food is gold and chairs are easier to be than people. And though it took me a while to digest it all, I came out on the other side of this book with a more profound interpretation of the traditional family dynamic and the feeling  that life is very strange, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Though the magic might fool you at first, this is a sad book.