Review of BLACK CAKE by Charmaine Wilkerson

 3.5 Stars

This audiobook has been keeping me entertained on walks for the last few weeks. 

In 2018 in southern California, Eleanor Bennett has just died, leaving her adult children (son Byron and daughter Benny) a lengthy audio recording.  The estranged siblings get to hear long-buried family secrets; their mother begins her story in the 1960s on an unnamed Caribbean island.  But the girl at the centre of her story is not Eleanor but Coventina Lyncook, a young long-distance swimmer living with her Chinese father.  Eleanor’s recording narrates a story which connects Coventina and Eleanor and explains what happened to them over the last 50 years.  Byron and Benny come to realize how little they really knew about their parents.  Just as their mother’s black cake incorporates ingredients from around the world, they find connections and heritage in various places.

It is the story in the past that held my interest.  In the present time, Byron and Benny are both self-centred and immature.  Neither is communicative so both experience relationship problems.  The suggestion seems to be that their secretiveness is an inheritance their parents unwittingly passed to their children, but, unfortunately, this trait makes them seem selfish and not sympathetic.  I didn’t really care what happened to them.

This is a family saga but it has quite a few elements of a soap opera:  hidden/stolen identities, an undying romance, a long-lost child, a murder mystery, implausible escapes, and coincidental meetings.  Unlike a soap opera, however, the novel must come to an end.  That ending involves too much tying up of loose ends; characters who appear only in the beginning re-appear, and we even learn about the fate of Coventina’s mother who had abandoned her family when her daughter was a child. 

I know I’m not the only reader to mention another problem:  the number of social issues that are mentioned.  Domestic violence, racism, sexual identity, colonialism, sexual assault, police brutality, employment discrimination, and environmentalism are just some of the topics that are addressed.  Unfortunately, because the author seems to have had a checklist of issues, none are examined in any depth. 

The book offers several lessons.  One is that we all probably don’t know our parents as well as we should:  what sacrifices they made and what hardships they endured.  Another is that untold backstories “shape people’s lives, both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.”  And though we can’t choose what we inherit, we need not let our inheritances define us:  we can choose who we become.  The novel also had me thinking about the food that connects me to my past. 

This is not a literary masterpiece but is definitely entertaining and was a wonderful companion on morning walks.