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A review by laurenleigh
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Read this for a Grass Valley Library book club that I attended. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. Generational family drama isn’t quite my thing these days. It felt like there was a LOT going on in a relatively short book, which got a bit confusing, overwhelming, or even unbelievable at times. (So many characters were famous or went viral. Too many.) However, one of the main issues Wilkerson touches on was quite interesting: the history of food, especially in colonial contexts. Who gets to decide which food is “theirs?” How do cultures lay claim to certain recipes, and what’s appropriation? One of the characters was going to write a book on this; I would totally read that!