Wreck
A Novel
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4.0 • 107 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK · INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Wreck is a delight. What an absolute joy to be reunited with Rocky and her family, the characters we all fell in love with in Sandwich. Newman's prose is laugh-out-loud funny. It's also profound. I couldn't stop reading, even though I didn't want it to end.”—J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs
“Wreck is the kind of book that pulls up a chair, pours the wine, and dives deep—equal parts hilarious, sharp, and achingly sincere. I didn’t just read it—I felt known by it. A luminous, laugh-out-loud triumph.”—Alison Espach, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding People
The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry—and relate.)
Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in.
It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal . . . until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them—and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.
With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people—no matter how much you love them—are not always exactly who you want them to be.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The spunky heroine of Catherine Newman’s hit novel Sandwich is back in another story full of laughter and life lessons. Rocky, a postmenopausal writer living in Western Massachusetts, shares her home with her loving but impractical husband, Nick; her college-aged daughter, Willa; and her elderly, widowed father, Mort. She’s adjusting to the absence of her son, Jamie, who’s left New England for a new job, when her anxiety suddenly fixates on two parallel preoccupations: a small, unexplained rash that sends her down a search engine rabbit hole, and the sudden, tragic death of one Jamie’s old schoolmates—a kid she hardly knew. Both of Rocky’s obsessions illustrate how many of life’s big and small disasters are out of our control. Newman makes Rocky and her family feel charming for all their neuroses and quirks, and the book’s abundant humor doesn’t compromise when deeper emotions come into play.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The appealing if underdeveloped sequel to Newman's 2024 novel Sandwich follows 50-something writer Rocky through another series of midlife dilemmas. Rocky is at home in Massachusetts with her husband, Nick, and their college-grad daughter, Willa, when they read in the newspaper that an old high school friend of their son, Jamie, has been killed by a freight train at a railroad crossing. Rocky feels awful, especially after learning that the wreck might have been due to the railroad's outdated safety equipment. The episode distracts her from the article she's supposed to be writing about spatchcocking poultry, as do the inconclusive results of tests her dermatologist had her take to determine the cause of her mysterious rash, which continues to spread. Her anxiety spikes even more when she learns that the railroad is a client of the management consulting firm that Jamie works for in New York City. The plot is pretty threadbare and Newman doesn't go very far with the overarching mortality theme, but she nimbly leavens the heavy material with Rocky's quirky humor, as when she calls the fussy Willa her "princess angel baby" or struggles to fix a ceiling fan ("It's not out of the question that I'll Godzilla the entire fan out of the ceiling and throw it to the floor, screaming"). The author's fans won't be disappointed.
Customer Reviews
Hoped for more at the end
I loved the story but was disappointed with the ending.