The secret family history in Charmaine Wilkerson's Black Cake is intriguing. It did take me a while to get through. Sometimes chapters were a little too brief, barely a snapshot. I picked up this book because my second book begins with the death of a mother and her estranged adult siblings forced to interact. Some complex relationships. A friend suggested it might be a good comp title for me. But that was the extent of the similarities.
I liked how one's surroundings - like the sea, like food - becomes the connector to identity. Glad to have read it. I always do love a good tale.
Page 70: While Benny's mother stood leaning against her kitchen counter in California, a blood clot quietly inching its way up from her pelvis to her lungs, Benny was still back in New York, getting fired from her afternoon job and boarding the wrong bus and finding herself standing in front of the kind of coffee shop that she wanted to have for herself. The cafe, with its too-early Christmas decorations, stood next to a small bookshop in a neighborhood that hadn't yet had the stuffing gentrified out of it.
Page 140: She'd grown up hearing that her parents' upbringing had not been as easy as hers, so she hadn't insisted on knowing more. Well, she finally has a chance, now, and the thought of it scares her. Benny feels like the more she knows about her mother, the more of her she will lose.
Page 153: "Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time."
Page 199: Eleanor wanted to run after the car, shout to Byron, call him back, explain to him that no, raising him and his baby sister was not the most important thing that she had ever done. What defined Eleanor most was not what, or whom, she had held close but what she had allowed herself to let go of.
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