Sandwich takes place over the course of a one-week family vacation on Cape Cod, at the same cottage our protagonist’s family has been visiting for one week every year. This time, our heroine Rocky is there with her two grown children, and her son’s girlfriend, her husband Nick, and a few days overlap with her parents – thus, she is the sandwich generation, with kids on one side and parents on the other. Also, she makes a lot of sandwiches for the beach days, because that is one of her love languages.
Over the course of the week, some old hurts and secrets are churned up – but it’s not as dark as you might think. The week is full of deeply conflicting and powerful human emotions: the tension of missing your small children so, so much, but loving who they are now so, so much. Facing the fact that your parents are aging, and that they also have secret pains and histories. Coming to terms with menopausal body, feeling alienated by it and at home in it, somehow simultaneously.
I read this for a book club and was one of the few who enjoyed it – others found it too light and breezy for touching on such serious subjects. A big bit of contention was (and I don’t think this is a spoiler in part because the book jacket explicitly refers to “a family vacation full of secrets” and in part because this book is about the experience of reading it) when Rocky reveals something she’d kept a secret from everyone, including, importantly, her husband, for 20(ish) years. (Don’t worry, there are so many other family secrets in there too!) One of my friends’ main complaints was that the revelation of this secret had no emotional fallout – Rocky shared it, and there was a difficult discussion, and then they carried on as usual, making sandwiches and talking about where to go for coffee in the morning. Surely, my friends said, there would be some fallout from this huge secret?! Wouldn’t her husband be angry, or upset, or … ?! But I disagree: if I told my husband about a traumatic thing that happened 20 years ago…he’d be like wow, crazy, why didn’t you tell me? And then we’d probably make some sandwiches and wonder where to go for coffee. The point, in other words, is that we all have little (or big) broken bits, and we love each other anyway; not all secrets need to explode your life. Some are just there, at the beach with you. This is not an explode-your-life kind of book.
And that’s why, to me, this book is the definition of a beach read. Not only is it set at a beach, but it’s lighthearted and punchy and real and funny – there is trauma, but there is so much love to cover up the wounds. The descriptions of the meals, the old cottage, the relationship with individual family members…it’s all so full of heart and hope, sitting right there with the sadness and grief. I recommend this to anyone who wants a read about occasionally dark things while reminding you that you’re never far from the light.