Noonday, by Pat Barker
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
“Barker creates her story, her vision of world events with emotional as well as factual depth, filing her fictional dispatches from well-researched historical moments in time.”
“Barker creates her story, her vision of world events with emotional as well as factual depth, filing her fictional dispatches from well-researched historical moments in time.”
If you are what you eat, what happens when someone else eats what you are? In Aimee Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, 9-year old Rose first experiences this conundrum when she tastes her mother’s birthday cake, only to come away with the uncomfortable understanding of her mother’s lonely dissatisfaction with life. The cake betrays the inner feelings of the cook. Over the course of the novel and Rose’s life, the predicament continues, building to an unwanted fixation of what constitutes food and those who grow and prepare it.
In When We Were Romans, Kneale commits wholly to a child’s perspective–bad spelling, misused words and all–with fresh and moving results. Nine-year-old Lawrence joins his mother and younger sister on a spontaneous road-trip to Rome, holding fast to the hope that they can escape his mother’s demons.
