Becky's Great Book Reviews Sandwich by Catherine Newman

This is the fourth in a string of funny books I've picked up quite inadvertantly, however joyously. Sandwich by Catherine Newman is a bitesize treat of a reading experience.

Rocky is at a Cape Cod beach house for the week with her family. Her grown kids have joined her and her husband Nick, and her elderly parents will come halfway through the week as well. The title refers to Rocky's age, sandwiched right between her children and her parents.

The protagonist's menopausal state of being is front and center in the narrative. Her character puts it all out there, yo-yoing through the indignities of an aging female body, to great moments of happiness and then spiralling in the next. Interspersed are hilarious experiences of parenting (past and present) along with funny depictions of her beloved but hapless parents. We learn of Rocky's grief over long-ago miscarriages as well as her secrets, which gives us a better picture of our main character as well as her marriage.

At any given page I was laughing out loud and also tearing up. At one point Rocky thinks, why do I always break my own heart? This is illustrated in the ways she grieves for her own children's smallness and rages (unfairly, imo) at her husband's ability to be perpetually pleasant. However much I can relate, I kind of wanted to shake her and tell her to get out of her own head!

Rocky's musings border on the profound, such as when she sees a young mother struggling with a toddler having a tantrum and Rocky offers reassurances to the mom while Rocky's daughter sweetly distracts the toddler. Rocky then has the thought that perhaps the main reason we're put on this earth may be to say to eachother, I know how you feel.

In spite of her occasional neuroticism, Rocky's joy at spending time with her family rises to the top, making Sandwich a delightful read. There is a follow-up novel called Wreck that I have on my tbr list. This book gets four and a half stars out of five from me.