The Continuing Adventures of Rocky and Nick
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I seem to gobble up Catherine Newman’s adult fiction. I loved We All Want Impossible Things and Sandwich, and now the same is true for Wreck. Though one does not need to read Sandwich first in order to enjoy Wreck, both novels contain the same cast of characters and both are told from the same woman’s point of view.
Rocky is that woman, and she is married to Nick – a character I absolutely adore. They live in Boston and have two grown children. Willa is currently living at home, but works at a lab at a local university while she applies to neuroscience PhD programs. Her older brother, Jamie, is a junior analyst for a consulting firm in New York. He has been married for a year to a woman named Maya.
What made Rocky a member of the sandwich generation in the first book was the existence of both of her parents. As Wreck opens, the mother has passed away and the dad has moved in with Rocky and Nick. They truly are one happy family.
They are deserving of the novel’s epigraph: “What a large target we make. The great dramas all begin like this: a surfeit of happiness, a glass-smoothed pond just begging for a stone.”
The stone comes in the first sentence of the first chapter as Rocky tells us, “In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path. Even if I don’t know it at the time.”
The two things that get casually mentioned in that first chapter are a red bump with three smaller red bumps trailing away from it that she sees near her elbow. And as she googles that at 3:38 a.m., she also peeks at local news. She expects to find information on the county fair or the menu at the local senior citizen center and instead she sees this: “One Dead in Collision between Train, Car.”
As both the train wreck and the bumps impact their lives, it is interesting to see how differently Rocky and Nick respond. As the author tells us: “[Nick’s] personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet.”
Perhaps the reason I liked Nick so much is his attitude is one I aspire to, while I am currently applying to engineering school alongside of Rocky. Just the same, I greatly enjoyed spending time with both of them in this book.
*****
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*****
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