Black Cake: A Story of Family Secrets
Book Cover
Black Cake: A Story of Family Secrets
How often do you read a story where a food item is almost as important as the leading characters? I’d never heard of black cake before reading the book by that name, but now I’d like to try it. According to internet sources, “…black cake is descended from the British plum pudding, [but] for Caribbean-born New Yorkers and their children, … it evokes nostalgia for the islands …”
According to her website, author Charmaine Wilkerson is from New York, has lived in Jamaica, and does much of her writing in Italy. Black Cake, published in 2022, is her first novel, and appeared this year on Barack Obama’s list of favorite books.
As a slow reader, it surprised me that I was able to start and finish this 385-page book in one day. I was caught up in the story from the beginning because of “family secrets,” a topic that I have discussed in a previous blog post. I hurried though the book to discover what the secrets were and how they would compare to those of my parents.
Black Cake is the story of Eleanor Bennett, her children, and a whole series of events Eleanor was only willing to tell her children about after her death, by means of an audio recording passed on through the services of her estate attorney. While there are many twists and turns to the plot, multiple important characters, jumps in time from past decades to modern times, it is nevertheless easy to follow. Chapters are short and have titles which make it clear which character and time period is being discussed.
The book raises many questions worthy of discussion or pondering:
1. What role does cake play in keeping the family together?
2. What lessons did each generation attempt to teach to the next? Did some of them backfire? Were there life lessons that should have been shared but weren’t?
3. Should a will be accompanied by a letter or recording disclosing family secrets or directing family members to do further research about family history?
4. When are family secrets appropriate and when do they do harm?
5. How would this story be different if set in a different locale or if the characters were of a different ethnicity?
6. How is this family affected by social justice issues, such as poverty, immigration, police misconduct, illegal betting, ethnic group conflicts, mental health, and sexual harassment?
7. What secrets exist in your family? How and when will they be disclosed, if ever?
If you care to provide your own comments on the book, you can add them in the comment section at the bottom of this blog post on my website.
Happy reading!