I heard about this book from someone I follow online and thought it sounded interesting.
"Sandwich" follows a woman, Rocky, in her fifties who is enjoying her annual vacation with her family. Every year, Rocky and her family enjoy a trip to Cape Cod where they can relax, enjoy the sun and sand, and build memories that will last a lifetime. This year, the trip is making Rocky reflect on her life and how she ended up with her two beautiful, adult children.
I really enjoy reading novels written from the perspective of an older character because I think it is important to have that voice heard. Rocky is going through menopause, and this novel unapologetically explores the unglamorous aspects of this and how Rocky is struggling with this new "normal".

An important and timely theme that this novel explores is abortion. When Rocky was younger, after she had her children, she got pregnant unexpectedly. Deep in the trenches of motherhood, she could not imagine adding another child to the mix, and unbeknownst to her husband, she got an abortion. Afterwards, she felt immediate regret, and desperately wanted to be pregnant again. Unfortunately, when she did get pregnant, she suffered a miscarriage. She has carried around the guilt of her decision for decades because she felt like because she chose abortion, she could not show regret for her decision. Abortion is not an easy decision, and most women do not take it lightly. Just because you made a decision, does not mean you cannot regret it. Rocky made the best decision she could at the time, and she has lived with that choice. It hurt her and it shaped her. Motherhood is not for the faint of heart, and no one should be forced into it if they have any doubts.
I really enjoyed how this novel was written. As Rocky is living her life in the present, there are things that her children are going through that are making her reflect on her own life and past. The narrative jumps between past and present, but it does so seamlessly. The story feels coherent, and the themes are strengthened by this type of storytelling. They may be separated by decades, but the characters are drawn together by such similar challenges and choices. 

 
I highly recommend this novel, and I look forward to reading more from Catherine Newman in the future. 

i wanted an easy, beach read with all the summer vibes and this book delivered it well. i do think the audience is geared towards older women, specifically women experiencing menopause. i couldn’t relate to Rocky all that much , our FMC, because i haven’t reached that part of life yet. understandably though, change is hard and this book makes it apparent.

Spoiler warning

I’ll start with the good, then the bad, then the almost great. This is a very voicy novel of mom, Rocky, at midlife, trying to sort out her life, her responsibilities, her family members’ metamorphoses into new life stages, and most of all, her immense, roller-coaster feelings about it all, while also being on vacation. Being at a similar spot in my own life, I found some of her experiences very relatable- and at times hilarious. Her description of menopause is Pulitzer-worthy on its own. The narrator feels everything so thoroughly which I really love. I want a novel that plunges the depths of the life experience which this one does-almost. The narrator’s observations about her family are very much in the vein of Jen Hatmaker, only more irreverent. Full of love, full of honesty, full of humor, achingly full of life. She goes so deep, but then nearly misses the mark, or does she? 
Which brings me to what I didn’t love. For one thing, the family was far too open with one another, in a cringe-worthy way. Dad getting freaky with mom while college daughter is literally sleeping right next to them is one mild example. You can be open and honest without being gross. 
Speaking of gross, the mom is just kind of awful. She loves everyone so much, as she constantly gushes, but also makes everything about her. Seriously, everything. Her poor husband is totally neglected and her children feel like they have to take care of their mom’s feelings all the time. But, to be fair, mom is going through some really tough stuff, which all comes to a head during this their annual family vacation. And here is the part that I equally love and hate, which I think maybe you are supposed to. 
It is genius. 
Rocky finds that she finally has no other choice than to come unflinchingly clean about her abortion experience. She gets to the heart of what really happened, of what she really did. And it’s utterly heartbreaking. Her young adult daughter, who lives her whole life as though she is an animated hand-held poster at a political rally, is totally confused about why her mom would have any feelings at all about it. Because abortions are totally cool, I think she says somewhere. The rubber really meets the road of the novel here…and then kind of starts to backtrack. Because we’re not supposed to say it out loud, right? Because then we don’t love women, or choice, or freedom or something? You can almost hear Rocky worrying about what her political party would think, (you can almost hear the author herself worrying about it too), but then she tells her daughter that this is real life, not a political ideology. Because here, at midlife, Rocky is finally acknowledging and speaking about what happened to her babies- she always calls them her babies. They had due dates, would-be birthdays. And both babies died, not just the one she wanted. And yet, it’s too horrifying to acknowledge to the full, so it is spoken about euphemistically, or much worse, not at all. Rocky hates this! Just say died and dead, she says. It’s so interesting, but not surprising when you think about it, that Rocky is so angry that she didn’t know that her grandparents died in the Holocaust- why didn’t you tell me?!- but also doesn’t want to know about it. Same with her parents aging. So much going on in this novel that mirrors the human experience. We lie to ourselves and each other- another huge theme in the novel- because otherwise life would be even more terrible than it already is. And that in itself is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing. But, also, lying might be the death of us. “Never keep secrets from each other,” Willa advises. All to say that this is why this novel is genius. Many readers will take it at face value because that’s all they can handle- and the author knows it. She can barely handle it herself. But she also loves you too much to keep on lying to you. The truth is wretched, and you should know it for what it is. 

There's a high you get when you complete an almost-perfect book and know you will forever chase that feeling—this is one of those books for me. It was strange, beautiful, hilarious, crude, and wonderful in every way. I've never seen the chaotic interior of my brain represented in print before, and my goodness, it is gratifying. I loved Newman's previous novel We All Want Impossible Things and praise it often. Sandwich will join its oft-recommended ranks, as well as be a repeat read for me.

This book was... Okay! I did notice pretty quickly that I for sure was not the target audience. As a 24-year-old woman, I could more than relate to Rocky's children but struggled connecting to her, the main character. I found her irrational and frustrating and had difficulty empathizing at times. Still, when I showed some passages to my mid-50s mother, she said Rocky sounded completely normal, and her behavior, while not great, was understandable. So clearly, it's not quite a book that fits for me. Another thing I also found frustrating was the "miscommunication trope", if you will, that seems to permeate a lot of books when there needs to be a conflict that arises. It's tiresome as a reader, but realistic as well, so it's not a deep-seated qualm I have with Newman. On a much minor note, there were a few times in dialogue and Rocky's inner monologue that made me physically cringe, which was a bit painful but again, I'm 24, and my mom joking about TikTok makes me cringe too, so it tracks.

Overall a decent read, but it is difficult to relate to the main character without undergoing menopause myself. I suppose that uncomfortableness I chaffed up against is intended, to try to get readers to understand the feelings and actions of someone undergoing these insane hormone changes. But I'm not in the audience/demographic that can emotionally connect to Newman's book/writing.

On the face of it this is just a description of a family's annual vacation week on Cape Cod, but it puts Rocky (Rachel) in the middle of events, an empty-nester sandwiched between her grown-up kids and her frail parents, slap bang in the middle of her menopause, which she describes with amusing bewilderedness (I screen grabbed quite a few pages here because I could relate so much, especially the word finding), while at the same time reflecting back to when her kids were young and she had two miscarriages - or were they? (Seriously, it wasn't hard to figure out with all the cryptic clues).

There really isn't much plot but you enjoy the closeness this family has and the love they feel for each other, even though they bicker all the time and lie to each other because they want to protect their family from uncomfortable truths about medical histories or past events.

It's a searingly honest account of what it's like to be a woman with all the issues that can entail.

I really enjoyed this perfect mixture of funny and sad - all the different feelings that can exist inside you at the same time.

The only thing I didn't like were the descriptions of all those weird American sandwiches!