Even when these events become far-fetched, Wilkerson’s dynamic writing and choppy chapters will keep more cynical readers turning the pages to find out what happens next. Eleanor’s life story emerges as the most compelling, an illustrious saga that features gamblers, Olympian swimmers, a murder mystery, betrayal, heartbreak, and love. “We had to be perfect to make up for the fact that our family is built on a colossal lie,” Benny laments.īlack Cake is told from multiple perspectives, darting between Eleanor’s younger years in the sixties, Byron and Benny’s upbringing, and the siblings’ lives in the present day. The siblings have not spoken in eight years, and the recording that their mother leaves them challenges everything that they knew about Eleanor and how she raised them.
Charmaine Wilkerson conjures similar scenes in her debut novel Black Cake, in which a deceased Caribbean woman named Eleanor Bennett leaves a black cake and a lengthy audio recording filled with secrets for her adult children, Byron and Benny.īyron is a successful oceanologist in California who wants to be the perfect immigrant son, a “shining example of the American dream.” His younger sister, Benny, is a wayward queer artist living in New York City who feels estranged from her family. This was serious business, an operation that covered my grandma’s living room and kitchen with vat-sized mixing bowls and various ingredients in order to make cakes for family and church members. Last Christmas, I helped my grandmother make black cake for the first time.
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