Oh boy, I went into this book with the highest of expectations! And Catherine Newman DELIVERED big. It was wonderful to revisit Rocky and her family. I loved Sandwich… this book might actually be better. The writing, just wow, so poignant. Each word feels like a deliberate choice. If you liked Sandwich you will enjoy this book. Huge thanks to NetGalley for an early copy. I will certainly be recommending this book to friends.

She’s done it again! Catherine Newman has written a book that makes me feel seen to my absolute core.

A follow up to 𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗵, 𝗪𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗸 reunites us with Rocky and her family and I couldn’t be happier. Rocky is so familiar to me. I see so much of myself in her actions - late night doom scrolling when you can’t sleep (magnesium glycinate ladies! It’s life changing!), worrying about your own kids and worrying about someone else’s, the fear that comes when one doctor appointment leads to another and another. Middle age is hard.

Even if I didn’t follow Catherine on social media and know she has a beautiful family, I would know she was a mother based solely on how she writes about Rocky’s love for her kids. I found myself highlighting so many passages where she managed to put into beautiful words the way I feel about my own young adult kids.

What resonated with me the most is when our young adult kids make choices that differ from our hopes for them. It’s hard to let go and let them become their own person. Like Rocky, I’m up late at night with worry.

If you take a beginning date and an ending date a couple of months apart and slice the time and everything that happened out of the calendar that would be Wreck. Although there is a death, but not in the family, although there are medical issues, but none life-threatening, although there are some issues between family members, but nothing that changes their love for each other--that would be Wreck. Rocky and Nick have a wonderful relationship as are their relationships with their children and Rocky's father. I'm sure that if the reader wants to make some of the issues the family lives through lessons for life, I like just thinking it is is just day to day life--kind of like Father Knows Best updated. The family has moved on from Sandwich, but I hope that there is more Rocky and her family to follow--maybe a road trip? grandchildren from Jamie and Maya?

This was the follow up to "Sandwich" I did not know I needed, but thoroughly enjoyed. Rocky continues to be such an incredibly relatable character for me that it is hard to believe she is not a person, but just an amazingly well-crafted bit of fiction. As with Newman's previous books, I found myself reading passages aloud to my husband because they were so funny and spot on. There will be some very happy readers when they get their hands on "Wreck."

I absolutely loved this author’s first book, but unfortunately, this one didn’t land the same way for me. I was excited to revisit Rocky and her family, but the spark just wasn’t there this time. While the writing still had moments of warmth and wit, the plot felt a little too meandering, and I had a hard time connecting with the story or feeling invested in the stakes. I appreciate the attempt to capture the quiet chaos of everyday life, but it didn’t hit as deeply or memorably as the first. Still, I’ll keep an eye out for what she writes next.

This is a followup to the author's previous book, Sandwich. So, it is a continuation of the family life of Rocky and her husband Mort, and takes place a couple of years after the Cape Cod vacation featured in Sandwich. Now they are home in western Massachusetts, almost empty nesters until their college grad daughter moves back in and Rocky's elderly father in law as well. It's all about daily life and family dynamics as Rocky gets a tricky medical diagnosis and also gets a little overly involved in investigating a local accident. Great read, especially for the many, many readers who enjoyed Sandwich and would love to catch up with the family.

I’ve been waiting eagerly to read this sequel to Catherine Newman’s Sandwich since I first heard about it. I was worried it wouldn’t live up to Sandwich, which set a high bar, but this follow up was just as good, if not better.

Featuring all of the characters from Sandwich, but set a few years after it ends, Wreck continues to focus on Rocky and her family… on her anxieties, her marriage, her health scares, her all consuming love for her children, and her caring for an aging parent.

Newman packs in so much truth and humor into this book. It’s both laugh out loud funny and poignantly sad. Newman has such a unique voice and an easy way of capturing big emotions. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.

Huge thank you to NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

Wreck ~ reflection on motherhood. Rocky is so relatable and far from perfect mom thats always made her children is her number one priority. You will cheer her on in all of her joys and angst. She has what every mother hopes for- a wonderful connection and relationship with her children. Such a great follow up to Newman's Sandwich. As we age we need the support of family and an amazing spouse that will go through all the good and crap we are handed!!

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper for an early read.

Enjoyed just as much and maybe more than the first in the sequence, Sandwich. I felt Sandi h gave short shrift to some of the challenges of midlife but Wreck faced them a little more squarely. Things like trying to help an adult child, medical issues, elderly parents. Didn’t go terribly deep but dealt with the issues with humor and grace.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC! If you enjoyed Sandwich, you’ll love this sequel!

Although I picked up Sandwich solely for the Cape Cod vibes, I was pleasantly surprised by Sandwich and the follow up. Wreck is another single-sitting read, but it took me several days to get through it. Rocky will have you laughing one moment and remembering how important it is to seize the day during the next.

The book takes place in Massachusetts, two years after Wreck, and although we don’t get to go to Cape Cod (I was sad about this 😂), Rocky gives us brief but lovely descriptions of New England in the Fall and the earliest start of Winter that actually made me homesick. I loved how we got to check in on all the characters from Sandwich, as well as some new quirky side characters. I don’t want to give away the plot, but Rocky reads about a death in the News and reacts in ways that all of us can relate to, but often don’t want to admit to.

Willa and her father both live with Rocky, along with Nick. And Jamie has a shocking role in this story, even though we don’t actually see much of him, or Maya. Rocky’s getting older and I really liked how Catherine Newman doesn’t sugarcoat anything. On top of the headlines Rocky’s obsessing over in the beginning, Rocky has a rash that leads to A LOT of doctor’s appointments, a million tests, medications and ANXIETY. There were less flashbacks in this one and hardly any mention of the major trigger from Sandwich. There was some minor and legal marijuana use. Overall I enjoyed this book and Catherine Newman’s writing!

THIS BOOK!! Catherine Newman knows how to get to the nitty gritty real life issues we face! I loved that it was a book about Rocky, as she is quite a woman that tells it like it is.

Book review: Catherine Newman’s Wreck
Published by Harper—thank you to Harper and NetGalley for my gifted ARC.

I fell into Wreck like you fall into a favorite chair—crooked, worn-in, and perfectly molded to your emotional posture. Catherine Newman, with her signature cocktail of domestic wit, maternal love, and anxious spiraling, has returned to the world of Sandwich and brought the whole messy, lovable crew with her. And what a gift that is. If Sandwich was a breezy Cape Cod summer, Wreck is autumn in Western Massachusetts, complete with family clutter, aging parents, adult children, and the slow-motion unraveling of the body and the mind. I devoured this book the way Rocky devours Reddit threads about skin conditions at 3:00 a.m.—compulsively, hungrily, and with a weird amount of glee.

This isn’t a plot-driven book, and thank God for that. The “action” centers on two events: a local train crash that kills a young man tangentially connected to Rocky’s family, and a mysterious skin rash that Rocky fears could be anything from eczema to death incarnate. If that sounds dull, you’re not ready for Newman’s voice. Her real subject isn’t disaster—it’s the emotional ricochet that happens when something might be wrong. Rocky is the kind of woman who panics not because she’s weak, but because she cares so deeply it short-circuits her. “I’m an undammable river of mother love,” she says. “A torch-brandishing one-woman mob.” That line could be engraved on the crest of every anxious, big-hearted woman I know.

The structure of Wreck is deceptively loose: a meander through kitchen conversations, lab results, neighborhood rumors, adult children texting from New York, and that peculiar claustrophobia that comes with loving people so much that you fear everything that might touch them. But Newman isn’t winging it—she’s orchestrating chaos with surgical precision. Every messy moment, every “nothing” scene, builds on the emotional architecture of Rocky’s world. It’s slice-of-life, yes, but it’s the thick, delicious middle slice of cake, full of layers, buttercream, and existential dread.

The return of familiar characters from Sandwich feels like a reunion without the performative hugs. Nick, the patient husband with a saintly tolerance for Rocky’s spirals, is still washing dishes and gently nudging his wife back to earth. Willa, their emotionally tuned-in daughter, is living at home, applying to neuroscience PhD programs, and somehow being both a source of comfort and constant worry. Jamie, their son, is in New York with his partner Maya, firing off text chains about Wordle scores and weird items from the Buy Nothing Facebook group. And then there’s Mort—Rocky’s 92-year-old father, newly widowed, newly moved in, and delivering one-liners like a sitcom elder statesman with a PhD in grief.

The joy of this novel is in the dialogue—those sparkling, strange, perfectly observed exchanges that make you feel like you’re eavesdropping in your own home. Newman knows how families talk: overlapping, backtracking, lovingly interrupting each other, and sometimes just sitting in heavy silence when words are too fragile to use. There’s a scene where Rocky’s medical anxiety tips into near-hysteria, and Nick, with all the weary tenderness of a long marriage, tells her gently to stop Googling things. Reader, I sob-laughed.

Yes, this book is is… the literary equivalent of watching a really good family drama through the crack in the door—intimate, raw, hilarious, and just intrusive enough to make you feel like you live there too.

Newman’s Wreck walks the delicate line between the mundane and the monumental. It’s about what happens when life doesn’t fall apart in cinematic ways, but crumbles in quiet, exhausting, deeply relatable increments. It’s a story of middle age that refuses to flatten or romanticize the experience. There’s no reinvention arc here. No glow-up. Just Rocky, a woman in the thick of it, loving her family so fiercely it gives her hives—possibly literally—and navigating mortality one prescription refill and guilt spiral at a time.

If you’re looking for tidy resolutions or dramatic payoffs, this isn’t your book. But if you want to feel seen, laugh at things that maybe shouldn’t be funny, and feel less alone in the business of aging, parenting, partnering, and Googling skin conditions in the dark, then pull up a chair. Wreck is for you.

Five stars. For the writing, the humor, the humanity—and the kitchen couch.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

#Wreck #CatherineNewman #BookReview #NetGalley #SandwichSequel #LiteraryFiction #WomensFiction #Books2025 #MiddleAgeReads #Bookstagram #SliceOfLifeNovel #MedicalAnxiety #FamilyDrama #KitchenCouchChronicles #ParentingAdults

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC for review.

I absolutely loved Newman's novel Sandwich, and I was excited to see a sequel featuring Rocky's family. It partly felt nostalgic and warm, and the family dynamics and love are so strong and emotional. However, the plot of this felt underwhelming, and not much happens aside from Rocky focusing in so hard on her anxiety while she deals with a health issue and a local tragedy. I wish there had been more sustenance to the plot and that the other characters were featured more.

Wreck was like seeing family again. Whether you know them from Sandwich or are meeting them for the first time, this cast of characters feels so lived in and fully-dimensional that it's impossible to not slip right in and feel like you're on of their own.

I love Catherine Newman’s clever and funny writing style and how she can bring so much humor even to the most mundane daily happenings. However, I found the plot of this book a bit dark and depressing.

Wreck is the sequel to Sandwich, which got mixed reviews from my patrons. This picks up on the family two years later. Rocky’s mother has died, her dad living w them, she’s battling an unknown illness, and a tragic accident underpins much of the story. I did not like it as much as I had hoped I would. But that is more of a reflection of me and not the novel. I would still recommend for all public libraries.

I loved Newman's follow up to Sandwich. Same characters and same warmth and depth. Perfect for women who enjoy quiet writing and hits that group of middle aged women that you typically don't see in fiction. Highly recommend!!

If you have loved anything written by Catherine Newman, you will love her latest novel. “Wreck” is another look into Rocky and her sweet family as they grow into their own through the uncertainty of life, health and acceptance. Catherine Newman shines once again with a story full of authenticity and love. It is humorous, kind, forgiving and honest.
I inhaled this book in one sitting and the exhale has been both joyous and cathartic. Catherine Newman understands the middle aged and grants us so much grace. All the stars and all the thanks for this gorgeous experience.

If you loved Sandwich, you’ll surely love this— it reads like the next installment and immerses us back in Rocky’s hilarious and anxious mind. Newman’s writing manages to be lyrical even in the midst of Rocky’s stressed, and I swallowed this book up so quickly. A big thanks to HarperCollins and Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I love Catherine Newman’s voice so, so much. She says the most meaningful things in the same sentence as introspection that makes you laugh out loud. I loved seeing Rocky and her family again, and I loved the background of her mysterious illness and the wreck as plot devices. I loved Wreck, and will read anything Newman writes—literally, anything.