Popular Fiction

Book Review: WRECK by Catherine Newman

| Jessica Crawford

Wreck by Catherine Newman is a 224 page novel published by Harper in 2025. It is the sequel to Sandwich, in which the characters are first introduced, but could potentially be read as a standalone.

Genre:

Literary Fiction, Popular Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Blurb:

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.

Opening Line:

In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path.

My Thoughts:

“The first biopsy I ever did was under my girlfriend’s jaw and it scarred terribly.” “…I’m not sure that’s a story for sharing with your patients, just FYI. I mean disfiguring your girlfriend and all.” “My ex-girlfriend,” he says. “Did I already say that?” “You didn’t,” I say. “But maybe it was implied.”

Another hilarious and heartstring-tugging story about Rocky and her family, who we first met in Newman’s book, Sandwich.

I will say I enjoyed this one just a smidge less because it seemed a bit aimless plotwise, but I still adored every moment spent with these characters. Beyond being fun to spend page time with, their family and life circumstances are just so relatable.

“I hear that it doesn’t sound so bad,” he admits, and I say, because I know how it feels to hurt your own feelings, “Sometimes things just feel bad anyways.”

This time, Rocky’s widowed nonagenarian father has moved in with them; she finds herself fixated on a local tragedy–how it reminds her the wellbeing of one’s adult children is never assured, and a family moral quandary that ensues; and she is experiencing a rare medical condition with no certain answers. But even with the heavy and emotional subject matter, her narration is as amusing as ever.

“It is what it is,” [her father] says. “But my temperature is 80 degrees, which seems low.” “Indeed,” I say. I make a mental note to replace his thermometer, which is doubtless from the 1960s and the mercury all leaked out into somebody’s butthole decades ago. Probably my own! That might explain a lot, actually.

These books strike a really sweet spot at the juncture of joyful and stirringly sentimental, and I am here for anything else this author writes.

Book Review: THE BOMBSHELL by Darrow Farr

| Jessica Crawford

The Bombshell by Darrow Farr is a 416 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Pamela Dorman Books.

Genre:

Literary Fiction, Popular Fiction, Historical Fiction

Synopsis:

A young woman’s radicalization sparks a widespread movement and media frenzy in this explosive novel of youthful passion, political awakening and first love, by an extraordinary new talent.


Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Severine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French-American daughter of a politician, Severine knows she’s destined for bigger things

That is, until one night, Severine is snatched off her bike by a militant trio fighting for Corsican independence and held for a large ransom. When the men fumble negotiating her release, the four become unlikely housemates deep in the island’s remote interior. Eager to gain the upper hand, Severine sets out to charm her captors, and soon, the handsome, intellectual leader, Bruno, the gentle university student, Tittu, and even the gruff, unflappable Petru grow to enjoy the company of their headstrong hostage.

As Severine is exposed to the group’s political philosophy, the ideas of Marx and Fanon begin to take root. With her flair for the spotlight and newfound beliefs, Severine becomes the face of a radical movement for a global TV audience. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Severine steps into the biggest role of her life.

The Bombshell is an electric novel filled with seduction and fervor as it explores the wonders and perils of youthful idealism, the combustibility of celebrity, and the sublime force of young love.

Opening Line:

In the hours before her kidnapping, Séverine Guimard claimed Antoine Carsenti’s virginity in a grotto overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

My Thoughts:

Maybe he was a kind of oracle, and maybe they were hurtling towards a cliff’s edge on a train whose brakes she herself had dismantled.

In 1993 Severine, the daughter of the French prefect of Corsica, is abducted by a group of militant revolutionaries. When the minister of the interior refuses to negotiate with terrorists and meet their demands to release a political prisoner, the freedom fighters are left with an egotistical and brash seventeen year old girl on their hands, one who knows how to charm and manipulate people to her liking. After being given reading material about the cleansing force of violence when overthrowing oppressors to pass her time in captivity, Severine decides she wants to join the revolution. She wants to help eradicate injustice, sure – but she also really wants to be famous as the mouthpiece for the organization, and the liberation movement as a whole.

Here was Severine at the top of some mountain, speaking to a camera for five minutes, and consequently, down below, fire, blood, smoke, ash.

I was sucked into this story! Severine was a great main character – not a great person all the time, certainly, but a really fascinating and bold driving force of the story. She is not one to let decisions be made for her, and is often able to mold things into the shape of her choosing using all the wiles at her disposal. And, now, also bombs.

In that moment, she understood something else essential about Bruno: as long as she assured him of his virtuousness and correctness, he’d believe it.

I also actually wound up feeling a certain kind of way for this little found family of revolutionaries! Although I never held out much hope for their chances, when they wound up effectively being led by someone who was in it for the right and wrong reasons.

…[she] had the unsettling realization that everything she’d ever done, any choice she’d ever made, was in consideration of men. Without an audience of even one man, who was she?”

This book doesn’t end in a manner that was as big and revelatory as I had anticipated. It’s a pretty quiet finish to an otherwise explosive story, but still satisfying enough in its own way.