Book Review: "Sandwich" by Catherine Newman

So yet again, I'm back with another cheap Kindle find and it's been absolutely scorching in the UK. Normally, I go for a walk almost every day, but the other day when it was super hot, I didn't mainly because I didn't want to feel like I'd been set on fire. UK heat is definitely different because in the USA, the houses are built with AC and are built to allow for heat to escape. In the UK, buildings are probably a thousand or so years older and were built to never let heat escape ever. Anyways, let's move on to the book Sandwich by Catherine Newman...

The novel is narrated by Rocky who has a husband called Nick and two adult children named Jamie and Willa. The family go to their familiar vacation cottage at Cape Cod and even though they seem to be having a great time, tensions are bubbling under the surface about things that Rocky has never really told the rest of her family. As the tensions rise, we see Rocky argue with her husband of thirty years in ways as though she is almost blaming him for not fully knowing her when she has not actually handed over all of the relevant information.

She sees her role as a mother evolving before her eyes as she also starts to experience menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes and bursts of emotional breakdown. She is a woman in her fifties yes, she has experienced a lot, but she also admits that now she must be there for her adult children in a whole new way. She also must be caretaker to her own parents in a way she increasingly notices her husband is not. She comments in the book that she has always been the one out of her and Nick that does the hard work emotionally, the one who holds up the family and watches the space, doing all the labour when it comes to feelings and relationships. It does sound like she's breaking down, but there is a certain amount of shame attached to what she is saying that we won't find out until later on in the book.

I'm not going to lie, I thought Nick was kind of a non-character in this book. Apart from just being a bit insufferable at times, he doesn't really serve a purpose except for overhearing the family secret Rocky shares with her daughter and then proceeding with the 'I forgive you' stance. I mean, I'm not going to lie here but I don't see how this 'secret' would have impacted Nick very much at all. It's a secret which is definitely there for the women to share because it's the women who will either know the experience of it, or understand what it is like to hold such a secret. I mean, the character of Maya is one good example of this.

Rocky is also confronted by mortality when her mother, Alice, collapses. Again, this is an exploration of motherhood through a different lens. The very idea that Rocky could also have her children, especially the introspective Willa, behave in this way around her is something she doesn't want. But it is something she must also accept is happening now with Willa's concern for her mother's emotions on the trip. I think this is why Rocky shares the secret with Willa and not with Nick - Willa is far more emotionally mature than her father.

The novel is really well written. As we get underway to the book's climactic points, we see the timeline move forwards and backwards as the narrator starts to reference points when her now adult children were once small toddlers. The narrative becomes one of looking back and looking forward and for Rocky, in order to reconcile her past with herself - it is super important that she sorts out what happened in the past.

I really enjoyed this book even though I thought it was going to be more of a beach read (which it was not). It is a great lesson in never judging a book by its cover. Honestly, it was the right length and written in the right style to make itself interesting. However, I do question some of the modern references the adult children were making and whether they were actually young enough to know them.