Linda Hammerick can taste words. Her name, for instance, tastes like mint. The word "mom" tastes like chocolate milk. Linda doesn't share her secret sense with very many people (obviously) and she spends a lot of time finding ways to lessen the "incomings." Tobacco, alcohol, and sex seem to do the trick, but that's not what this story is about.
Linda is a typical small-town southern girl growing up in North Carolina in the 1970's-80's. That she is different from everyone else is obvious, but she gets along fine, has a best friend and a boy who likes her. Yes, there are some very bad experiences, but Linda grows up to attend Yale and become a lawyer, and to have a pretty good life. The only thing that makes her different, we think, is her ability to taste words.
But we learn at the very end of Part One of the novel that we're wrong: there is something else that makes Linda very different from everyone she grew up with, and the second part of the novel deals with her journey to find out where she really comes from. But it's more that: it's also about discovering what constitutes a family.
There are some great southern characters in the novel - I adore Baby Harper - and many typical southern scenarios (the town gets all their gossip from the beauty shop). But the language and structure take this from mass market novel to literature: I just loved it.
Bitter in the Mouth: A Novel
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