“The by-product of suffering, if you’re lucky, is appreciation — the savor of chance windfalls.” – from Cakewalk.
Cakewalk, a memoir by Kate Moses, transports the reader on a frosted yet roughly-chopped mixture of her baked goods, sugar-filled, candy-lane life. Written with recipes purposefully hidden in the mix, Moses uses her personal ingredients to sift the reader through her concoction of life’s hidden spices pressed into her mother’s bizarre baked-goods hoarding rituals while scooping out her family’s caravans to her father’s promotions, leaving behind dollies of finely-diced chapters spread thick with layers of her escapes into scrumptious sugar highs and lows among cookies made with only the finest “chocolate chips for weirdos.”
With Kate’s highs spiked generously with slices of her mother’s erratic need for a playmate and her lows boiled over her father’s inaccessible approach to his family of strangers, readers will melt into Kate’s memories baked forever in a hypoglycemic state of despair. Kate serves up her life, peeking through oven windows as she whisks through the rises and falls of her adolescence, and finally coming out clean from her parents own selfish cookie-cutter needs to cool completely on her wired family’s legacy.
With Cakewalk, the author whips together her personal strifes with well-folded fluff, leaving the reader intoxicated into forgetting the bitter after-taste of a childhood firmly packed in a need for sugar intoxication with understandable vindication.
Though rising slowly at times, Kate’s memoir frosts her family’s own cake crumbs into remnants of memories with sheer glossiness for the reader to savor long after Cakewalk is devoured. Moses’ well-blended mixture of cooled imagery sprinkled throughout Cakewalk leaves the reader with a fresh hunger for even the most common German Chocolate cake as her life’s dough is rolled into ecstasy not ever before kneaded.
This post originally appeared on my former blog, StyleSubstanceSoul.
Great review Mare! My “to read” list is growing!
What a delicious review by Mare Henderson and I look forward to reviewing her novel one day! Mare, you have a way with spinning words well. Thanks for reviewing Cakewalk which I now look forward to reading myself.
Once again, I agree with J.R. and Jen that Mare Henderson has creatively crafted two well-written reviews. After reading Mare Henderson’s well-spun creative review of Cakewalk, I want to read the book and have cake!
My husband is right. After reading Mare Henderson’s well-written review, I want to go buy the book and a German Chocolate Cake. Mare Henderson used crafted imagery with creative verbage to add a story within a story to her review, giving review readers anticipation of reading a novel she in hopes will write. When Mare Henderson publishes her next novel, I volunteer to do the review.
After reading this review, I had trouble figuring out what exactly this book is about. There were too many fanciful turns of phrase that made it all confusing. However, I’m left with a desire to read the book anyway, so mission accomplished?