Just before her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. She's horrified to find that this gift reveals that her cheerful can-do mother tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, anything can be revealed at any meal. Rose, confronted by the secret knowledge all families keep hidden, finds truths about her mother's life outside the home, her father's strange detachment, her brother Joseph's clash with the world.
