Black Cake: A Novel

Really enjoyed the book and how the flash back to the past brought the book together.

I think overall we all agreed the main storyline was good but, so many characters to remember and some forced storylines made it longer than necessary for the main plot. Our group was diverse in thought to which characters evoked what emotions but it made for a lively discussion!

This is one of the best book I’ve read this year. I f*ck recommend it. For sure will be watching the adaptation of it in Hulu.

“...untold stories shape people’s lives both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.” Eleanor Bennett has died and left a house full of memories good and bad, a piece of her traditional Jamaican black cake, and a trail of secrets. She couldn't quite bring herself to speak them out loud, but also couldn't leave this earth without revealing them. Now her children must put the pieces together and embark on a journey to acceptance, healing and understanding. They will finally begin to see their mother as a human being first and then as a mother. I loved Eleanor's furvent guarding of tradition and heritage. It was all she had left of her own absent mother to share with her children. It conjured my memories of the large jar of fruit that was always soaking in a cool dark corner of my grandparents' basement, waiting along side the marzipan and the sugar flowers for my grandmother to render into a beautiful cake for someone's wedding or for special occasions like Christmas. “You were never just you, and you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that. Because the people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part.” The story of Eleanor's experience before she became the mother of Benny and Byron is a familiar one. A story of hardship and of desperate longing for something better and of sacrifice. Unspoken pain, stories partially told, people and places and times off-limits to questions, fear of being "found out". Many Jamaicans who make the bold choice to leave their island home have such stories; some of them triumphant, some of them tragic, but all of them important to shaping who they are and who the generations after them will become. As a first-gen Canadian of Jamaican descent, I am forever humbled and grateful. The threads of Eleanor's and Benny's and Byron's and Marble's stories, how they each handle the aftermath of Eleanor's secrets (knowingly or unknowingly), are presented almost like individual short stories, which can be a little jarring and maybe even confusing to some readers. However, they are woven together beautifully, with sparse but interesting details of Jamaican history, of the Chinese-Jamaican experience particularly, and of the Windrush Era in the UK following WWII. A must-read, especially for people of Caribbean descent.

This was our first book.