The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The book is described as haunting and mesmerizing but I found it to be really just odd. At the age of nine Rose Edelstein realizes that she can sense, in the food she eats, the feeling of the person who made it. Her discovery begins with the sense of emptiness and sadness in her mother's lemon cake. It turns out that her family is dysfunctional in all the regular silent, disloyal, dishonest ways and a few very mysterious ones. The impossibility of the story doesn't keep the reader from wondering if there aren't just a few things in our real world that are just as difficult to explain as the mysteries in Rose's world.