Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Black Cake is a remarkable debut book that had me hooked from the off.
Byron and Benny come together for a reading of their mothers will and an 8 hour recording that she left for them. This recording tells the remarkable story of her life and the many secrets she held.
This book has a lot going on; different timelines, told from various characters point of views and many subplots. It will make a great TV series but as a book it is overly ambitious to the detriment of any emotional connection to its characters and the overall story.
An interesting, clever but ultimately frustrating novel.

What an absolutely amazing debut. A present time story switching to the past to explain the life which their mother lead. A powerful and heartfelt telling of one woman’s determination to live her life free of what was planned for her. I can’t wait to read more from this author.

Black Cake is a stunning debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It starts in 1965 with a father stood at the water’s edge on a Caribbean island desperately seeking his daughter who has disappeared. We then move to the main characters of Byron and Benny, a brother and sister in present day Los Angeles whose parents were born in the Caribbean just after the second world war. Their mother had died and has left an eight hour recording that she wishes them to listen to together. Byron and Benny had always been told by their parents, Eleanor and Bert, that there was no family back on ‘the island’. and both Eleanor and Bert had been left as orphans at a young age. There is a tradition of black cake on the island which is a recurring theme in the book. It's a fruit cake made with burned sugar and Eleanor was keen to pass the recipe down the generations having learned it from her own mother.

Over the course of the novel we learn of many secrets, struggles and dramas in the life of the main character. I loved this novel and didn’t want it to finish while simultaneously wanted to know how it all turned out. What a lovely book with a great plot. I will be eagerly awaiting more novels from Charmaine Wilkerson.

With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Michael Joseph UK for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Covey, Bunny and Gibbs are three friends growing up on a Caribbean Island, sharing secrets, adventures and ambitions.
Eleanor, Etta, and Bert are three successful adults making their way in the world, keeping secrets from each other, and for each other in order to prevent their worlds from imploding. Benny and Byron are second generation immigrants, comfortable with their Californian identity, and never really exploring their Caribbean roots....and then they have a funeral to attend and family ties, and family lies are revealed, leaving everyone questioning how one event has shaped their lives. 'Many more people's lives have been shaped by violence than we like to think and more people's lives have been shaped by silence'.
An excellent intergenerational, cross country tale exploring loss, deceit, and migration. How we fit in, stand out, and hide in the shadows
This story explores how we are bound by our culture, and how our future is shaped by those trailblazers that went before..
A book that needed to be written about a transient generation connected to their roots by food.

Very much a plot-driven novel, it's easy to see why this has been snapped up pre-publication to be turned into a series. In its original form, a little too much 'telling' rather than 'showing' makes it hard to completely emotionally connect with the characters at times, but as a debut, Black Cake is surely an augur of great things to come. 3.5 stars.

I started off loving this book - the setting, the characters - but it became overly contrived and complicated with constant shifts in time and new characters being introduced in lengthy segments before we found out how they were connected to the story. Every time I picked the book up again I found it a real slog to get back into it due to the confusing layers and number of characters (some of whom have very similar names (Benny and Bunny, for example), and a few of whom even change names in the novel, to add to the complexity!).
I also found it hard to connect with Benny and Byron and the pausing of the mother's story to go back to their dramas just took me away from the main story and often jarred. Could have been fantastic but just became really frustrating!
Gorgeous cover though!

This is an incredible story about an amazing woman and her life story. It takes us from a small Caribbean island tp Britain and on to California. The story of Covey, a tragedy, an escape, a lasting love and a life well lived in deception. It raises many issues along the way but overall it is an emotional well crafted story. Highly recommended.

With thanks to PenguinRandomHouse and NetGalley for ARC in return for an honest review

How many stars?

I’m very mean with my stars and very rarely give 5 but this debut novel deserves this and more

This is a fantastic story told in present time and switching to the past. The characters are all so lovable, in their own way and my interest was held from the very beginning. The story is set over two continents and I felt I was truly there

Black Cake is a traditional Caribbean cake, hence the title. A family is brought together where they discover what they believed are untruths. When they have finally learned and come to terms with their new history they sit together and share some Black Cake

This book would make a beautiful film and I really hope someone has the brains to option it

I cannot wait to see it played out on the big screen

I am recommending this book to everyone and envy you starting out on the first page

I absolutely adored this book! The writing is so powerful and heartfelt that with each character you hear from you get an insight into how they feel and their truth of the situations, it is very cleverly done with a real grasp of those family conflicts where everyone is too hurt from their own perspective to listen and see things from the other. It was so interesting to see how the trauma of generations before them continued to pass down to Benny and Byron, how both had such difficult personal relationships and carried a burden of responsibility and expectation. It was also wonderful to see how so much positive had interwoven between all of the characters in common and what truly lay underneath all of the tensions, secrets and hidden pasts. Such a rich and powerful story that grips you right until the very end.

Beautiful debut, this compelling story kept me up a few nights. A family saga with a few twists and turns, I would definitely recommend.

the choppy storytelling is not for me. i found the writing somewhat flat and the shifting povs do not help as i did not feel particularly immersed in what i was reading.

Very good multi layered, family drama. Not the usual type of book I read, but it is good to change genres from my usual thrillers and Sci Fi and read a good family drama with interesting characters, and some intrigue thrown in .Very good book, well worthy of a read..

This is an absolutely STUNNING debut novel!

We follow a brother and sister who haven't seen each other in eight years. They're brought back together after their mother's death in order to listen to a recording she's made telling them the truth about her life and their family history.

Although I immediately enjoyed the storyline, characters and writing style, it wasn't until about a third of the way through that I was gripped and finished the book in one sitting. There's a lot going on at first but it all comes together and it's worth every second of your time.

The way Wilkerson threads the different timelines, people and locations together is absolutely wonderful. It has really made me appreciate my family, friends and other people in my life, and the impact we all have on each other. It felt like there was no word in this book that was wasted - it all built up to something magnificent and the ending was perfection. Every character in the book had an impact and I appreciated that each one got an ending.

This is a nice mix of historical fiction and contemporary as we move between past and present. It also has a focus on identity including race and sexuality, and there's a strong environmental theme throughout.

Highly recommended!

he said that you had to love the sea more than you feared it. You had to love the swimming so much that you would so anything to keep on going.[...] Jut like life, you know.

A family saga with elements of a mystery. Emigration, sacrifices, traditions, making the most of opportunities and last but not least: love in all its forms.

I really loved the first half of this book. A strong and intriguing start: a will and a confession promising an exiting story. And it it. Covey's story has all the elements that I love in migration stories. People who have had to go the extreme lengths to survive yet they still made something of themselves and tried their best to keep traditions alive.

But B&B's stories were rather weak - typical narrative of children of emigrants that either fall short to their parents' achievements and sacrifices or feel victims in the current racial narrative. I had no interest whatsoever in them, therefore the second half was such a boar to read. In all honesty I've skimmed read the last 30% and the all's well that ends well approach to the final didn't do anything for the story either!

Many thanks for the opportunity to read this!

Sometimes it’s very difficult to put into words how much you enjoy a story. This story is full of the twists and turns that make a novel interesting. It’s full of well rounded characters, flawed, and human, and complicated. It’s got experiences that differ from my own, something I have been seeking out the more that our world puts different voices at the forefront of literature. I appreciate this story for allowing me a moment in the lives of these people, though fictionalised, they represent real people who (up until more recently) I have not easily had access to their worlds. I value the words on the page, well collected, well shaped, until the story breathed in front of me. I felt absorbed by a world many moons ago, and it allowed me to wonder about another time, another place. I didn’t love every moment from this book. I especially did not enjoy how selfish Byron was at times (though that’s more a personally issue than an issue with the story). His lack of understanding that maybe, just maybe, the situation isn’t two sided. I adored Benny, but not nearly as much as I adored Covey and Bunny. I feel there are moments that could have gone further, there are moments that didn’t go far enough. But ultimately it’s a story of humans being humans, making mistakes and falling apart, picking up the pieces and finding a new way forward. This is why we need more diversity in our entertainment. So that those who don’t understand that our deeper experiences are very much shared, can understand that at the heart of it, we are all flawed, complex beings who value love and family and traditions.

Wonderful read, I would highly recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

Absolutely gripping read; I couldn’t put this story down.
Following the death of their mother, siblings Byron and Benny are reunited after many years of estrangement. Together they must listen to a recording their mother made shortly before her death, from which they will discover a multitude of family secrets and unspoken truths. Can Eleanor reunite her beloved family and will the truth finally be uncovered?
This is such a beautifully crafted book with well drawn characters. It covers a multitude of themes which have crossed generations and continue to do so to this day. I felt like I lived this story with the characters; I laughed, smiled and cried so many times. A truly brilliant debut novel and I hope to read more by Charmaine Wilkerson in the near future.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Random House for an e-arc in exchange for a review.

This is a really gorgeous rich tale.
We begin with Benny And Byron who, after their mothers death, are asked by her lawyer to listen to a long audio recording she made before her death.
This recording tells the story of a young girl, growing up in the Caribbean, whose life is hugely defined by the absence of her mother, her gambling father and her love of ocean swimming.
Spamming several decades and continents, this is a wonderful family drama that really explores what makes us who we are, the secrets we keep to keep our lives and loves safe, and what it means to belong and our cultural identities.
And what happens to us when the story we thought we knew about our family and our background isn’t what we had grown up to believe.
Highly recommend.

This is an unusual story. It starts with an estranged brother and sister brought together to hear a recording after their mother's death. On it, she tells her children about her background, things she has kept secret for many years not only about herself, but about their father and an unknown sister. The siblings soon learn they aren't who they thought they were, though a tradition of making black cake has survived through many iterations of the family, forming the one tradition they have hung on to.

It took me a while to get into it, but it drew me in and in multiple layers of storytelling and different perspectives, became something I was really interested in. It covers issues of race and identity as well as love and tragedy, loss, and finding one's strength under adversity. I also felt the value of hope in the narrative and how sometimes, you win.

I liked the changes in perspective and how they filled in details of what happened to the various characters, both back in the 1960s and current. The time slips felt smooth and different points of view were well done. I also liked that the answer to the most burning question was saved until the very end, so that the reader is kept guessing about what really happened to one nefarious character.

Overall a very good read that kept me interested all through.

Having stayed up late to finish this novel, I am struggling a bit to put my thoughts together while it is fresh in my mind.
We start with two young girls growing up on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. They are obsessed by sea swimming. Covey and Bunny’s lives follow different paths after Covey’s marriage and the trauma immediately following this.
The story is told in the form of a recording being played to Covey’s children following her death and this is a catalyst that allows the family to unite with others in a deeper way. Black Cake is the metaphor here.
I really enjoyed the dual timelines and the detail of Jamaica’s history. (The fact that this is Jamaica is never mentioned explicitly, but you know from the detail). I didn’t know about the tensions between islanders and Chinese immigrants that was mirrored by the tensions faced by black immigrants to Britain in the 1960s. It was sad for me to read that the decade of my privileged, white childhood masked these things.
The up to date narrative clarifies everything and whilst the plot is good, the character driven elements are what makes the novel for me.
An excellent debut novel and my thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this in advance of publication. The fact I received this free of charge in no way influences this review. I am sincerely grateful to be given the opportunity to try so many books I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up.