Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson

100-Word (or Less) Synopsis: Benny and Byron haven’t spoken in years, but after being called to a lawyer’s office after the death of their mother, they learn that everything they thought they knew about their parents was a lie.

Expectation: A big-hearted family drama with historical fiction elements and the experiences of Caribbean Americans.

Reality: It delivers on the drama and Caribbean experience, but there’s too much plot and too many people making it feel overstuffed and undercooked.

Recommended For: Easy-to-read crowd pleasers.

Why I Read It: It’s one of the most popular books of 2022 and several people I know loved it.

My Take:

“Black Cake” the debut novel of former journalist Charmaine Wilkerson is one of the most buzzed about books of 2022, and while entertaining enough, I forced my way through the last third after becoming tired of the multiple characters and pile on plots.

Outside of the exceptional audiobook narration by Lynnette R. Freeman, I found the sum of the parts of this “Cake’” decidedly dull instead of delectable.

Objectively speaking, this is not a terrible novel. Wilkerson writes with an accessible and breezy style that tingles all your senses. The short chapters help push the reader forward, and the mysteries are all wrapped up in the end. In other words, it’s the perfect crowd pleaser.

It also felt mediocre, suffering from a case of being overcooked and under satisfying. Wilkerson had the elements of fantastic novel here, but whether by her own doing or advice from an editor, she continually drifted from the most compelling narrative in favor of plots for less interesting characters.

The estranged Bennett siblings reconnect after the death of their mother to hear a recording full of family secrets that upends all they previously thought to be true. While that sounds more nefarious than it is, secrets are definitely the family business, with each of the core characters — Benny, Byron, Eleanor, Bert, Etta, Pearl, Lin and Marble — concealing their own mysteries.

Usually I’m a fan of multigenerational, interwoven stories with various POVs, but with 12 major and minor characters, it began to feel like they were competing for page space versus pushing the story forward.

Eleanor’s story was the most compelling. Tracing life in the Caribbean, Europe and the United States over 40 years, her experiences are the primary plot driver and reason to read the novel.

When her story effectively runs its course about 70 percent of the way through, we shift primarily to her children, Benny and Byron, who have the worst luck of anyone you’ve ever met. I was intrigued by Etta’s and Marble’s narratives, but they weren’t given much to work with and felt like they were in a different novel altogether.

Wilkerson either needed to make this novel longer, allowing her to mine for the emotional depth I thought was lacking amongst several individuals or cut about 100-pages and effectively removing the contemporary plots and characters that were more disjointed and far less interesting. Don’t add quasi-queer elements, police brutality and #MeToo subplots if you aren’t going to explore them.

If you’re someone that likes plot-driven, historical fiction that’s fast paced, I’d recommend this novel. If you’re someone that likes your characters to feel lived in and stories that are more contained to specific moments versus multiple, I’d say proceed with caution.

Regardless, I’d highly encourage the audiobook. As mentioned above, Lynnette R. Freeman gives life to each of the characters. At one point I had to see if it was a single narrator or multiple, because she did such a great job providing a unique voice to them all. Without her performance, I likely would’ve given up on this one once Eleanor’s story ran its course.  

Rating (story): 3/5 stars

Rating (narration): 5/5 stars

Formats: Audiobook (library loan)

Dates read: August 14 – August 20, 2022

Multi-tasking: Good to go. The first 30 percent requires some attention as all the characters are introduced, but after that it’s easy to focus on the plot while doing other things.