Whenever life becomes too stressful, Ruth imagines herself inside a warm, freshly baked cake. Cakes are her comfort and her talent, from traditional carrot cake to her unique sweet potato bundt cake with rum-plumped raisins. But today the 51-year-old homemaker’s regular stress-relief mechanism isn’t enough. Her husband Sam has just been laid off from his hospital administrator position with no immediate job prospects in sight. Ruth’s father, an itinerant nightclub pianist, has broken both wrists and has no choice but to move into Ruth’s house, which is already occupied by her mother and her testy 16-year old daughter.

Tempers flare between Ruth’s divorced parents. Their diverse approaches to life can be illustrated by the fact that, while both are piano players, Ruth’s mother never plays without sheet music and her father utterly disdains it. Sam’s despondent loafing gives way to a mid-life crisis as he considers chucking hospital administration altogether and rehabbing sailboats instead. Ruth starts to realize that it’s up to her to save the family from financial and emotional disaster. And the answer may be a piece of cake.

Ray manages to pack quite a lot of emotion and humor into 225 pages, not the least of which is a sincere plea for the renewed appreciation of cake, which we too often decline out of guilt. Cake, Ruth reminds us, is “what’s served on the happiest days of your life,” and deserves to be savored. Her reminiscences of the first time she baked cake with her mother, including her childish fascination with the littlest measuring spoons, rings true for any of us who ever bonded with their own mothers in the kitchen. Cake also turns into a metaphor for finding your life’s passion. It’s easy to empathize with Sam, who has been the family’s sole breadwinner for 20-plus years without having the freedom to determine what he really wants to do. Ruth realizes that if she’s to keep her 25-year marriage thriving, she has to let Sam explore his own personal “cake.”

Ray is also to be commended for reminding us that family dynamics never stop evolving. Having three generations of family living together in close quarters and facing a crisis forces each family member to develop new roles that highlight their particular skills and gifts. And of course there are those wonderfully well-rounded mature characters. Not only does Ray depict individuals in their 50s who still have sex lives, she even dares to hint that sensuality can survive into the 70s as well.

Eat Cake is charming, but it’s an angel food cake type of book, not quite as rich or fulfilling as Step-Ball-Change, and it could have benefited from a few more secondary characters from outside the family. I’m also scratching my head in puzzlement at Ray’s apparent fondness for including one wise black character in each of her novels. Is this progress or patronization? I’m not sure.

If you’re balking at the idea of spending twenty bucks for this slim novel, consider the fact that the recipes for all of the cakes mentioned in the story are included in its appendix. A perfect evening might just consist of curling up in a comfy chair with a piece of Ruth’s Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread Cake and this book.

--Susan Scribner