The Cake House is a tale of mourning and change for a teenage girl.  Rosaura, who goes as Rosie, lives with her mother, step father Claude, and step brother Alex. Rosie’s father killed himself not long ago, and now his ghost talks to her.  She is not settling into her new life well. Early in the book, she cycles around the suburbs nude and is taken to the police station to be collected by her mother and step farther.  She is a precocious young person and but she isn’t particularly mature. She gets into a relationship with her step brother Alex, partly because they are thrown together by the chaos at home.  The marriage between their parents is stormy and seems ill-considered.  Rosie makes some bad decisions, and her family’s life just keeps on getting worse.  But there’s a resolution at the end which promises that she will sort things out.

However, what is distinctive about Salom’s debut novel is not the plot, which is, if anything, rather mundane family drama.  The story is narrated by Rosie herself, and her language is mostly direct. The question for the novel is whether Salom succeeds in getting into the head of her narrator and creating a convincing character.  The answer is that Rosie is an intriguing character, often smart and insightful. But she is half-formed and does not know much about what is going on. Her interactions with her mother stand out as the most compelling relationship in the book. Her mother is scattered and self-absorbed, unhappy and unreachable. Rosie is often angry or disappointed with her.  Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book lacks this interest, and it is hard going.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York