\u201cBlack Cake<\/a>\u201d is Charmaine Wilkerson<\/a>‘s debut novel, and it quickly rose to success. The novel is a multi-character story about family secrets and \u2014 more pronounced \u2014 the complexity of family relationships across cultures, choices (or lack thereof) and borders. For these reasons, \u201cBlack Cake\u201d has garnered a wide audience, a New York Times Best Sellers designation and a Hulu + series adaptation. Her followup novel, \u201cGood Dirt<\/a>,\u201d has also received a great deal of acclaim and review.<\/p>\n Wilkerson\u2019s experience and biography seem to inform the familiarity and emotion in this novel. She, too, is Caribbean-American. She has also lived in the same settings as the novel: the U.S, Jamaica and Italy.<\/p>\n This winding novel that always comes back to the tradition of home and making meaning. It is a compelling story of love, loss and grief.<\/p>\n What is first intrigue built around a posthumous message a mother has left for her two children, moves cautiously and meticulously to untie the knots that thread the multi-narrator novel that is \u201cBlack Cake\u201d by Charmaine Wilkerson. Set in multiple locations across the U.S., the U.K., and an unnamed island in the Caribbean, \u201cBlack Cake\u201d is a story about the familial ties that connect estranged family, and how migration \u2014 forced and chosen \u2014 have colored a tapestry of Black lineage and life.<\/p>\n The novel begins with the reader meeting two siblings who have been estranged for eight years. Benny and Byron have been brought together to their family home in California after the death of their mother.<\/p>\n Their mother, Eleanor, has left a video that the two have been requested to watch together. Recollections about the past, their personalities and propensities punctuate the narration of the video. Their mother reveals to them that they have a third sibling, one they haven’t met. But, to tell that story, their mother begins with a girl who grew up on an island, Covey.<\/p>\n After some time in the book, you can easily forget where you started. The author drew us in with the siblings and their dynamic and emotional scars they choose to show or hide, and then retains you through another story that transports you to a lush, small place.<\/p>\n Covey, we learn, is smart and athletic; she is strong-willed and curious. We learn the everyday nature of her life, receiving a generous insight into her adolescence. We see her grow up, develop a taste and affinity for the water, always swimming and then advancing to surfing. We learn her defiance, her desires, and her friendships and how she holds both in regard. After some time, Covey is forced to leave the island in a dramatic escape after the death of her arranged husband on their wedding night.<\/p>\n Spoiler Alert<\/strong><\/p>\n Covey assumes a new identity and moves to the U.K., and is forced to start over. For her own safety, she must forget who she was and where she came from. Covey, we learn through the mother’s posthumous recording, is not their unknown sibling, but their mother herself.<\/p>\n The rest of the novel unfolds the relationships their mother and father navigated, how the island connected them as a couple, and then as a family unit, how and where their third sibling has ended up in the world, and the biggest question the book poses is how to make and remake home in your image and taste.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Cake,\u201d a traditional Christmas cake made throughout the Caribbean \u2014 and famously in Jamaica \u2014 is a metaphorical driver in this book. The cake is the symbol of the layered practices of preservation, travel and food that allow us as people to access memories, land and culture, to make and remake home.<\/p>\n \u201c…Baking a black cake was like handling a relationship. The recipe, on paper, was simple enough. Its success depends on the quality of the ingredients, but mostly on how well you handle them, on the timing of the various processes, and on how you respond to the variables like the humidity in the air or the functioning of the thermostat.\u201d<\/p>\n Readers of \u201cBlack Cake\u201d may enjoy other multi-narrative constellations like \u201cGirl, Woman, Other<\/a>\u201d by Bernardine Evaristo<\/a> or \u201cKintu<\/a>\u201d by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> At The Rauch Review<\/a>, we care deeply about being transparent and earning your trust. These articles explain why and how we created our unique methodology for reviewing books and other storytelling mediums.<\/p>\n<\/div> While \u201cBlack Cake\u201d is deeply referential to Caribbean culture and life, the crux of the story is in human relationships. Wilkerson carefully unspools the lives of about eight or nine central characters, revealing at different times where their stories intersect, diverge and often intersect again. Sometimes the intersections are miraculous, where you may have thought two people would never find each other again.<\/p>\n The reader of this book is therefore someone interested in the human condition, and understanding how estrangement can happen before you can even trace why, or what value do you place on \u2018the whole truth.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Cake\u201d reads like historical fiction, speculating within grounded political and geographic contexts, while not requiring a literal identification with a particular Caribbean island. The audience can read and learn about racial dynamics in the Caribbean influenced by slavery and immigration, and not hold the author or characters to be definitively Jamaican or Guyanese.<\/p>\n The audience is wide because it’s a story about life and the struggle to realize home.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Cake” is written from a third-person omniscient POV. We hear from or about more than 10 characters over the course of the novel.<\/p>\n This perspective aids in constructing environments, senses and journeys that build layered understandings of place, space and time. For example, while in the Caribbean, we see through the eyes of several characters.<\/p>\n Spoiler Alert<\/strong><\/p>\n These POVs build out the world of Covey, who later becomes Eleanor, and is the late mother of Benny, Byron and their older sibling, Mable. The Caribbean chapters are very immersive, creating a stark contrast with the world of the videotape, and the worlds Benny and Byron occupy in California in the U.S. We learn about the calm of the bay that Covey swam in, as well as the social structures that both aided her Chinese father as well as later targeted him. We learn about the tradition of Black Cake, and how it is an heirloom: where fruits soaking in rum for months or years are used to make cakes that can also sit for years in freezers and ice boxes, pulled out for Christmas or anniversaries. All of this content privileges the depth of Covey\/Eleanor, which in turn allows us to understand her children and friends she has loved and left behind.<\/p>\n This story reads in a breeze; it\u2019s very inviting, very intriguing, but also carefully pulls the reader along. What is first intrigue built around \u2018what is on the tape that the mother of these two children left for them to watch after she\u2019s passed?\u2019, moves meticulously to setting other truths free. So while one may keep reading because there are some family secrets Benny and Byron\u2019s mother wants to reveal to them, it becomes obvious that there\u2019s no spectacle here, and that the author is speaking a delicate, thoughtful language amidst the trauma and impossible choices some characters have had to make.<\/p>\n As secrets of a past life, murder, escape on her wedding night are revealed, Covey children and their emotional scars start to shift out of their stiff and unmovable positions. As siblings they are saddened by the horrors that happened to their mother. Nonetheless, her truth seemed to make their lives clearer. Of course, the promise of meeting their oldest sibling drives the siblings to finish the video from their mother, as well as make a choice about how to navigate gaining a new sibling after the loss of their final parent.<\/p>\n This novel is also compelling because of the miraculous intersections of the characters’ lives. We are able to see how certain characters are not lost to each other forever, and can hold onto memory until the physical reunites them again. Without spoiling, Wilkerson affirms that a small place like an island remains a small place even when you leave it.<\/p>\n As one reads \u201cBlack Cake,\u201d the \u2018endpoint\u2019 constantly shifts, challenging the idea of a concise resolution for any particular character. The novel begins with two children who are struggling to reconcile their own estrangement, as well as process the death of their mother. The resolution is rooted in simply \u2018finding\u2019 their older sibling, but it shifts massively. As the narration expands, the reader can become motivated by other characters\u2019 desires and journeys, wanting to see resolution, reunification, or karma come into play.<\/p>\n While the narratives of each character’s lives reveal more clarity on why they\u2019ve made or been pushed to make certain choices, the story deepens, becoming more emotionally weighted.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s paperback edition is about 370 pages, but it reads very quickly. Most chapters are between 3 and 5 pages. This structure gives the book an accessible rhythm and allows for multiple timeline jumps.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Cake\u201d is also able to be immersive through intimate histories.<\/p>\n While the island in the novel is only referred to as \u2018the island,\u2019 the author notes at the end of the book that personal histories and written histories from Jamaica informed the experiences and contexts of the characters. As such, the reader learns about the complex history and reality of immigration in Jamaica through lived experiences, rather than recounted, impersonal facts.<\/p>\n As a slave port, the majority of the population of Jamaica is Black, descendent from the continent of Africa. Additionally, there are a lot of mixed race people as a result of slavery- sexual assault, imbalanced power relations, etc. and a great deal of colorism that dominates social relations.<\/p>\n Some racial categorizations retain particular people’s origins: Chinese, Indian and pejoratives to match, depending on how people treat each other. Lin, Covey\u2019s father in the novel, talks about not knowing China anymore, and that the distance was reified on two occasions: One, when he married a woman, a Black woman, who did not know Chinese traditions like how to cook for luck or prepare for New Year’s. And two, when his shop was burnt by his community for the mistakes of another Chinese man, but also for his past mistakes of gambling, drinking and debts. When losing everything, he realized he was firmly planted on that island, with nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n The characters in \u201cBlack Cake\u201d are developed in a show-don\u2019t-tell manner. Rather than listing each character’s backstory up front, Wilkerson opts to share glimpses of their experiences and how they have dealt with or reacted to those experiences.<\/p>\n This method of character development doesn\u2019t dictate to the reader how you are meant to feel about any given person, nor do you at any time have a full picture of what has led them to make their choices.<\/p>\n The role of \u2018the truth\u2019 plays a role in the story.<\/p>\n Toward the end of the novel, when all \u2018secrets\u2019 have been revealed and the video is over and so are most of the \u2018flashbacks\u2019, suddenly, things open up for those who are still living in the 2010s, compared to the 1960s of Covey and Gibbs. Suddenly Benny can find where she may be going after struggling to realize her formative career. Byron gets to have another leadership position working with his mother’s friend, his auntie. Mabel, who goes by Marble, their sister, gained a new family and a long-awaited answer to who her birth mother was. Suddenly the conundrums are so faint, so silly, so dramatically shrunk in size, it could make you remorseful for how their size obscured what you could have known much earlier.<\/p>\n The writing in \u201cBlack Cake,\u201d as mentioned, carefully releases emotions, revelations and timelines. Additionally, Wilkerson\u2019s writing is descriptive and emotional, and is able to lodge a great deal of depth in both ordinary moments and momentous events.<\/p>\n In describing a breakup, Wilkerson writes about Byron: \u201cByron had wiped Lynette’s number from his list of contacts on the night she’d walked out on him. He’d punched delete with a sense of satisfaction, as though she might feel the defiance in his gesture throbbing across the airwaves, as though it might lead her to regret her hasty exit.\u201d<\/p>\n In another excerpt, she writes about how one moment changes all the moments to come. In this case, the end of girlhood and the thrust of adulthood, \u201cAs Bunny hugged Covey, as Covey wept and started to talk, Bunny felt the full weight of their girlhood crashing down on them.\u201d<\/p>\n The reader travels in and out of these settings, as well as timelines. The Caribbean is a setting of \u2018back then,\u2019 as well as the UK of the 1960s. Italy, however, becomes the setting that both Benny and their sister, Marble, end up in for their love and interest in culinary arts and culinary history.<\/p>\n The U.S. is where much of the contemporary story resides, which also resembles the history maps of power, and where opportunities and extraction are centralized.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Cake\u201d is a story that is a narrative accomplishment in terms of building out the worlds of numerous people, and threading their intersections with relief, excitement, resentment and miracle.<\/p>\n The characters of this story are still moved and pushed by demands of their interpersonal lives, which are equally shaped by the political histories of colonialism, slavery and capitalism. However, the beauty of the book resides in recognizing these systems in their push and pull, not by their literal name.<\/p>\n The same is with black cake as a dessert. Without the description ever literally stating that black cake is an heirloom, a cultural object or a tie to a layered heritage, it becomes understood that the cake remakes the island, and that the characters can re-spin it out of what they have, and reach for it when they want to remember a place or person or time. The cake, and much more broadly, the tradition, sits in the retina, nose and hands of the characters, connecting them through time and space.<\/p>\n\u2018Black Cake\u2019 Summary: A Recipe Connects Generations and Heals Estrangements<\/h2>\n
Books Like \u2018Black Cake\u2019<\/h3>\n
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Audience and Genre: Wide Readership For a Deeply Human Story<\/h2>\n
Perspective: Head Hopping<\/h2>\n
Three Cs: Compelling, Clear, Concise<\/h2>\n
Compelling: A Secret That Becomes So Much More<\/h3>\n
Clear: Beautifully Unclear<\/h3>\n
Concise: Immersive<\/h3>\n
Character Development: Methodical Revelations<\/h2>\n
Prose Style: Lyrical and Descriptive, Packed in Short Chapters<\/h2>\n
Setting: The Caribbean, U.S., U.K. and Italy, Oh My<\/h2>\n
Cultural and Political Significance: Humanist, Politically-Informed Story<\/h2>\n
Critiquing the Critics: Miracles, Coincidence or Convenience?<\/h2>\n