📚 Review: Holy fuck. This book was absolutely stunning. By page 37, I had cried and laughed out loud multiple times, and had written down 7 quotes and had taken multiple photos of full pages of beautiful writing. I literally cried and laughed out loud through this entire book, and was an absolute mess at the end. In the middle of the night after finishing it, I woke up and thought about it and cried. This book explores themes of grief and loss and the anticipation of these, and what it means to love and the hurt that comes with it. It also talks about what it means to be a parent, and to love your children as they grow. Though I’m not a parent, I absolutely sobbed at this, and about thinking about my mom (how dare I move out and grow up, honestly), and how much love can hurt. The way she used sandwiches to talk about the ways in which Rocky knows her family members so deeply - how different they are, how similar, what their preferences say about who they are - was so beautiful. Something so mundane that drew on the theme of the emotional work many mothers do in tending to their families was so central to this book. The writing was STUNNING, and I loved this book. Catherine Newman writes “It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”, and I feel like that’s what this book was. That, and so much more. 

There are so many beautiful quotes I wrote down while reading - I’m including them below. 

💫 Rating: 6/5. This very quickly became one of my favourite books of all time. 

QUOTES: 

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.” 

“What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.”

“It’s too beautiful to bear — and too much to be worthy of.” 

“What, exactly, are we doing here? Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.” 

“It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at - the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.” 

“Grief bright in the periphery, like a light flashing just out of view.” - literally cried immediately when I read this line 

“There is so much more I want to ask him. About the texture of grief in the household of his childhood.” 

“But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.” 

“I would pick this life too, I know. I’d even pick the way that pain has burnished me to brightness. The pain itself, though? I imagine I’d give it up if I could.” 

“I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go. To be honest, though, I sometimes feel like love is that already.” 

“Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.” 

“And we’ll be as young and as whole as we’re ever going to be.” 

“A transition is so much gentler than an ending.”

“… and what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect.” 

“It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”

“Imagine trying to make that color yellow just from the soil and sunlight,” Willa said. She was leaning against my father, who was smiling and frowning and dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. “Like, if someone was like, here’s a bowl of dirt. Make two perfect shades of the brightest yellow you ever saw! You totally couldn’t do it.” We agreed that this was true. “So what is that? I mean, I know it’s nature. Photosynthesis. Adaptation. But is it magic too?” We thought that maybe it was.

33

A holiday read with some depth - a real treat.

Title: Sandwich
Author: Catherine Newman
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: 4.50
Pub Date: June 18, 2024

T H R E E • W O R D S

Relatable • Nostalgic • Messy

📖 S Y N O P S I S

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

💭 T H O U G H T S

I had the opportunity of travelling to East Sandwich, MA in April 2024 for a grief retreat with some amazing ladies, so adding Sandwich to my TBR was an obvious choice. Marketed as the ultimate summer read, I knew it would be an ode to Cape Cod and the slow pace of life associated with escaping city life and making memories.

Spanning one week, we follow three generations on their annual family vacation, while also getting flashbacks to vacations from years gone by. Exploring themes of motherhood, parenting, shifting family dynamics, ageing, making memories, and the love language of food, this novel wholly embraces Cape life.

Each member of the family has their own personal flaws, yet it is these flaws that makes this such a relatable story. I appreciated being inside Rocky's mind and getting a front row seat to her train of thought, which was at times hilarious. There are definitely summer vacation vibes here, but it also has a layer of depth and serious topics.

Sandwich was the perfect short read for my summer travel. My travel to the area where it is set enhanced my reading experience and ultimately brought the setting to life even more than Newman's writing does. Marketed as a summer read, this one has a lot more emotional depth than I was anticipating, so if you're looking for something light and fluffy, this isn't it. I'll definitely be exploring more of this author's work in the future.

📚 R E A D • I F • Y O U • L I K E
• Cape life
• family vacations
• the love language of food

⚠️ CW: mental illness, post-partum depression, pregnancy, miscarriage, blood, abortion, infertility, sexual content, death, death of parent, grief, body shaming, cursing, alcohol, vomit

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it's love expanding. I don't know. I just know you can't create loss to preempt loss because it doesn't work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it's your last resort, because it is."

"There are wounds that never really heal, no matter how much time they take."

"Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum." 

One of my favorites ever ever. The words, the dialogue, the people — all of it is so heart-stopping, so beautiful, so human and poetic and precious, even as it makes you laugh wildly as you read. The details of the setting, the characters’ histories, the nuances of how they interact — truly, I’ve never read another book with more wondrous and personal shading, layers, and magic. I loved this. I will read it again, and I will go back and read Catherine Newman’s first book, her essays, her non-fiction, and then every word she writes forever.

I did not like this book at all. And I’ve read the author previously and liked her work! 

I thought I was going to get a multigenerational look from the mom’s point of view in a breezy lighthearted “beach read” that wasn’t a romance. This excited me. 

This was nothing of the sort. 

The main character, the mom, who goes by Rocky, is a narcissist. She’s a shitty wife and does not consider her husbands feelings or perspective over and over again. It’s all about her. Unfortunately; he allows this and ultimately excuses it. And she has a weird relationship with her daughter. Who goes skinny dipping with their adult kids? I found this weird. Maybe that’s just me. 

This book is mostly about pregnancy loss with a side of parenting your adult kids and your aging parents simultaneously (hence the sandwich). It’s very heavy at times. I don’t think it would resonate with many people with shared experiences of loss, but I can only speak for myself. I think it would have the potential to be triggering. Additionally, it was a big turn off to me when the main character played with clots expelled from her body. I found this disgusting and a detail that could have been omitted. It did not make this “more realistic” or enhance the reality of the situation. 

The daughter was mildly annoying, but believable. Jamie and Maya were pleasant side characters, and even the mom and dad were fine. 

But the only character I actually liked was the cat, Chicken. For this reason I did not give it a one star. 

Very glad to be done with this one. It was not for me.