Joseph wasn’t accepted by university that his friend George gets in. My sister
didn’t get the chance to take exam to enter the best middle school in the city, but her best
friend Yu gets in. Things happened to be just the same in my life and in the story, though
my sister didn’t lock herself in the room all day—she just hadn’t stopped complaining
about it. I have never seen her being this emotional and wordy, and that is the time when I
feel her hands are tied and can help nothing. She indeed suffered from the failure, but I
just realized that I have no idea how to comfort her, or at least calming her down. All the
loss needs to be conquered from their inner heart and the abnormal behavioral manners
are the alarm of their mental breakdown.
Aside from my own experiences that help me understand this story, Aimee Bender
successfully engaged readers and received general acceptance even when the “familiar
world is made unfamiliar by the presence of magic” (Kalmus, 2016) for its use of magical
realism. If there is no authoritative narration in novel, film, and television with the
involvements of magic, the audiences tend to question the rationality of the stories. How-
ever, Rose’s social conflict raised by the special ability of tasting emotion is directly
perceived by readers through the instant description of her very first tasting experience.
Despite her family members’ and friends’ ignorance of her superpower, it is the readers
who follow her sensory path and, as a result, are aroused with sympathy to her situation.
Bender further promotes the reader inside this unrealistic human body to experience her
inner world as she first encounters the unexpected “birthday gift”. In fact, with the reliable
storyteller, it’s much easier to stay with the magical setting of special tasting skills once
the readers have stepped inside the characters’ skin. This effective narration angle primely
constructs a close association with the story events for the readers, which avoid them from
feeling detached with some magical elements.
In magical realism, audiences have nearly the same rights of creating stories as the
authors. Gaps are left with magical elements but can be filled differently by various
readers. I didn’t expect Rose’s situation is like this helpless and hopeless when I first get
in touch with the introductory things that briefly depict a figure with a superpower of
tasting food; instead, I assumed that this would be a comical one to read. Reflecting back,
what really woke me with this empathy was my own memory and of searching for value
in my social circles and trying to make the connection with my family member, which
impressed me when the correlation perfectly augmented their passion on generalizing the
love and suffering that characters are receiving.