📚 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.

Sandwich was surprising in the best ways: I laughed when I wasn’t expecting to, cried several times, and fell in love with the narrator of this little book. I wanted every character in this sweet family to be real so that I could befriend each of them. It was refreshing to read a novel about family who are big fans of each other and on each other’s team through thick and thin.

Wow, I don’t know if I read this book at the perfect time to fall in love with it, but it really hit me in the feels! The perspective and characters were so lovely and even when they were fighting or pushing each other, you could feel the love and care they had for one another. I really loved how the story was written- the casualness of the main character made it feel like she was speaking to me. The banter with the mother, her husband, her children, and her own parents was so delightful and it really made me fall in love with them as a family. The Cape Cod scene was such a perfect setting and the descriptions of the location, food, smells, and feels made it feel like I was there.

There are definitely content warnings here and it’s quite possible that a more conservative reader would not like this as much as I did- I imagine this is why it has some low reviews as well.

Overall, it was short (I read in one sitting on a plane), emotional, and delightful. There were so many quotes that resonated with me and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

Sandwich isn't written like a diary, but it most certainly reads like one. Rocky's character is so three-dimensional it hurts, and being privy to her inner thoughts felt like being inside my mother's head. Catherine Newman is exceptional at detailing the conflicts and deep, deep love of motherhood, and I'm so glad to have read something so raw and real. So many people like to gloss over how hard being a parent is, but Newman isn't afraid to peel back the nuanced layers.

I do have a reason behind rating this book 4.25 though. It's clear here that Rocky is a deeply flawed character, but she seems to spend more time making excuses for her behavior than apologizing to her family for her narcissistic tendencies. The epilogue also felt too wrapped up in a bow for me to really connect with it.

Read this if:
-you want to understand your mother
-you love family dynamics more than fast-paced plots
-you need a good beach read
-you aren't afraid to cry a little