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A review by rrickman33
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
4.0
This was a super moving debut novel about two siblings finding each other again after the passing of their mother who left a few family secrets behind for them to find out. The writing in this book was gorgeous and I loved learning about Benny and Byron’s mother’s past as it unfolded. The chapters were super short making it so easy to fall into and had me unable to put it down.
One of the themes of this book was a woman’s shame and was one of the main reasons the family was estranged. Benny had shame and had pulled away from her parents and brother, Benny’s mom had shame and had hidden basically a past life from her children.
To put it perfectly I’ll use a quote from the book itself:
“Why do we women let shame get in the way of our well-being? I thought that times had changed since I was a girl, but apparently, not enough.” This quote really stuck to me while reading this book and had me considering how I’ve let my own shame shape my life and affect my well-being and THAT is a sign of a good book.
I loved reading so much about food and culture in this book and how Black Cake really did tie everything together. I learned so much about the Caribbean Islands and their real life culture in this book and that’s one of my favorite things about reading. It didn’t feel like I was assigned to learn anything but I did anyways and I enjoyed it.
The only reason this ended up not being a five star book for me was the structure of the book. I much preferred the first half of the book and thought the second half couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, it almost ended in a thriller-esque sort of way. Other people from our #tttbookclub did not have a problem with this at all so I think it’s personal to what I was wanting from the ending of the story. As always reading is subjective!
I highly recommend this book, especially for a book club, we had so much to talk about with this one!
One of the themes of this book was a woman’s shame and was one of the main reasons the family was estranged. Benny had shame and had pulled away from her parents and brother, Benny’s mom had shame and had hidden basically a past life from her children.
To put it perfectly I’ll use a quote from the book itself:
“Why do we women let shame get in the way of our well-being? I thought that times had changed since I was a girl, but apparently, not enough.” This quote really stuck to me while reading this book and had me considering how I’ve let my own shame shape my life and affect my well-being and THAT is a sign of a good book.
I loved reading so much about food and culture in this book and how Black Cake really did tie everything together. I learned so much about the Caribbean Islands and their real life culture in this book and that’s one of my favorite things about reading. It didn’t feel like I was assigned to learn anything but I did anyways and I enjoyed it.
The only reason this ended up not being a five star book for me was the structure of the book. I much preferred the first half of the book and thought the second half couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, it almost ended in a thriller-esque sort of way. Other people from our #tttbookclub did not have a problem with this at all so I think it’s personal to what I was wanting from the ending of the story. As always reading is subjective!
I highly recommend this book, especially for a book club, we had so much to talk about with this one!