Take out your mixing bowls to read Jayne Anne Phillips' Lark and Termite. Cake batter inexplicably dominates page after page of the narrative until the story unfolds and begins to bake. Multi-voiced, layer upon layer, a confection brimming in torrents of words, and frosted to perfection, the tale may be slow going at first. But for readers with a high tolerance for its trippy passages filled with the music of memory and dreams, the book is worth the journey.

Sensual. Electrifying. Critically acclaimed. Seems there’s no shortage of praise for this “long-awaited” coming-of-age novel, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Plenty of sound and fury, evocative of William Faulkner, himself, yet not quite the fire power.