Review: 'Black Cake' a delicious novel in bite-sized chunks

“Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson takes a new approach to the novel

“Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson (Ballantine Books)

The debut novel of former journalist and short fiction writer Charmaine Wilkerson opens with a one-paragraph prologue called “Then/1965.” A man stands at the water’s edge, “waiting for his daughter’s body to wash ashore.” The next page is titled “Now/2018″ and we meet Byron and Benny, estranged siblings seeing each other for the first time in eight years at their mother’s funeral.

The chapters come fast and furious after that. It takes some getting used to at first, but you eventually settle into a rhythm and enjoy puzzling together what happens between each short snippet. It’s 382 pages of flash fiction to fill in those 53 years between Then and Now.

It all adds up to quite a story. Every character has multiple narratives. There’s the face they present to their fellow characters in the novel, then there’s their true backstory, which often flips that public face on its head. Or as Benny wonders in her own head as she grapples with her parents’ history: “This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.”