Wreck by Catherine Newman (and a Cocktail Recipe) for Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! Though it’s just an ordinary Thursday here in the UK, I always strive to mark the occasion. Today, it’ll just be with a slice of pumpkin pie. But I’ve also been lucky this year to be invited to two Thanksgiving feasts, the first (vegetarian) last Saturday with a few North American neighbours from my book club and the next one (vegan) coming up tomorrow with university friends, one of whom is half-American. Meal #1 was splendid and kept us fed with leftovers for four days afterwards (I’m sure the second will be equally delicious and bounteous). We contributed mini squashes stuffed with leek and cauliflower macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and onion gravy, a pumpkin pie, and nibbles and cocktails. I adapted this pumpkin pie martini for J (too acrid and too sweet for me) but the rest of us had a signature cocktail I invented. Recipe below.
Friendsgiving Berry Cobbler
(Serves 1; or multiply by the number needed!)
50 mL Bombay Bramble gin
20 mL fresh lemon juice
20 mL homemade simple syrup
5 mL Grand Marnier
5 mL cranberry sauce or lingonberry jam
Mix all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, shake well, and strain through a fine sieve to serve. Garnish with fresh cranberries, frozen blackberries and a twist of orange peel. Top up with ginger ale to taste.
Last month I reviewed Wreck by Catherine Newman for Shelf Awareness. It was one of my Most Anticipated books of the second half of the year and has a sequence set on Thanksgiving, which is reason enough to reprint it here.
In Catherine Newman’s third novel, Wreck, a winsome sequel set two years on from Sandwich, a family encounters medical uncertainties and ethical quandaries.
Rocky is a fiftysomething food writer and mother of two young adults. After Rocky’s mother’s death, her 92-year-old father moved into the in-law apartment. Rocky and Nick’s son, Jamie, now works as a junior analyst for a New York City consulting firm. The engaging plot turns on two upsetting incidents. “In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path,” Rocky divulges. First, she notices a mysterious skin rash, which, along with abnormal blood work results, eventually points to an autoimmune liver condition [primary sclerosing cholangitis]; second, news comes that Miles Zapf, one of Jamie’s high school classmates, died in a collision between his car and a train. Was it suicide or an accident? A moral complication arises: Jamie’s firm advised the railroad company.
As one New England fall unfurls, leading to an emotionally climactic Thanksgiving Day, Rocky airs her fears over her prognosis, her father’s infirmity, and her children’s future. Empathy is a two-edged sword—she can’t stop imagining what Miles Zapf’s mother is going through. Newman (We All Want Impossible Things) writes autofiction that’s full of quirky one-liners and particularly resonates with anyone facing mental health and midlife challenges. There’s family drama aplenty, but also the everyday coziness of family rituals, especially those involving food. This warm hug of a novel ponders how to respond graciously when life gets messy and answers aren’t clear-cut.
(Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)
In short, it’s enjoyable and effortlessly readable, but Rocky is A Bit Much, and after you’ve read Sandwich this is really just more of the same. 
Plus, more Thanksgiving reading ideas in this post I wrote way back in 2015.
May Graphic Novels by Alison Bechdel, Peter Kuper & Craig Thompson
May has been chock-full of new releases for me! For this first batch of reviews, I’m featuring three fantastic graphic novels that have made it onto my Best of 2025 (so far) list. I don’t read graphic books as often as I’d like to – my library tends to major on superhero comics and manga, which aren’t my cup of tea – but I sometimes get a chance to access them for paid review purposes. (The first two below are ones I was sent for potential Shelf Awareness reviews, but I missed the deadlines.) Reading these took me back to the early 2010s when I worked for a university library in South London and would walk to Lambeth Library on my lunch breaks to borrow huge piles of books, mostly taking advantage of their excellent graphic novel selection. That was where my education and fascination began.
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel
I’ve read all but one of Bechdel’s works now. Fun Home was among the first graphic books I read and is a great choice if you’re new to this form of storytelling. It’s a family memoir about her father’s funeral home business and closeted lifestyle, which emerged shortly after her own coming-out – and shortly before his accidental death. In Spent, Alison and her handy wife Holly live on a Vermont pygmy goat farm. Alison has writer’s block and is struggling financially despite her famous memoir about her taxidermist father having been made into a successful TV series, Death & Taxidermy. Mostly, she’s consumed with anxiety about the state of the world, what with the ongoing pandemic, her sister’s right-wing opinions, and the litany of awful headlines. “Who can draw when the world is burning?” she exclaims.
Then Alison has an idea for a book – or maybe a reality TV series – called $UM that will wean people off of capitalism. That creative journey is mirrored in Spent, which is composed of 12 “episodes” titled after Marxist terminology. Through Alison’s ageing hippie friends and their kids, Bechdel showcases alternative ways of living: a commune, a throuple, nonbinary identity, unpaid internships, Just Stop Oil demos, and the influencer lifestyle versus rejection of technology. It’s (auto)fiction exaggerated to the brink of absurdity, with details changed enough to mock but not enough to hide (e.g., she’s published by “Megalopub,” the hardware store is “Home Despot,” her show airs on “Schmamazon”).
Tiny details in the drawings reward close attention, such as Alison and Holly’s five cats’ antics during their morning routine, and a stuffed moose head rolling its eyes. It’s the funniest I can remember Bechdel being, with much broad humour derived from the outrageous screen mangling of her book – cannibalism, volcanoes and dragons come out of nowhere – and her middle-class friends’ hand-wringing over their liberal credentials. Even the throwaway phrases are hilarious. It’s a gleeful and zeitgeist-y satire, yet draws to a touching close as Alison has the epiphany that she can’t fix everything herself so must simply do what she can, “with a little help from her annoying, tender-hearted, and utterly luminous friends.”
Accessed as an e-book from Mariner Books. Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape (Penguin).
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper
Nearly a decade ago, I reviewed Peter Kuper’s Ruins, which features monarch migration and has as protagonist a laid-off Natural History Museum entomologist. Here insects have even more of a starring role. The E. O. Wilson epigraph sets the stage: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” We follow an African American brother-and-sister pair, the one dubious and the other eager, as they walk downtown to the New York Public Library. The sister, who holds a PhD in entomology, promises that its exhibition on insects is going to be amazing. But just before they reach the building, a red alert flashes up on every smartphone and sirens start blaring. A week later, the city is a ruin of overturned cabs and debris. Only insects remain and, group by group, they guide readers through the empty exhibit, interacting within and across species.
It’s a sly blend of science, history, stories and silliness. I loved the scenes of mosquitoes and ants railing against how they’ve been depicted as villainous, and dignified dung beetles resisting scatological jokes and standing up for their importance in ecosystems. There are interesting interludes about insects in literature (not just Kafka and Nabokov, but the Japanese graphic novel The Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka), and unsung heroines of entomology get their moment in the sun. The pages in which Margaret Collins, an African American termite researcher in the 1950s, and Rachel Carson appear to a dragonfly as ghosts and tell their stories of being dismissed by male researchers were among my favourites. Informative and entertaining at once; what could be better? Welcome our insect overlords!
Accessed as an e-book from W. W. Norton & Company.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson
I’d read several of Thompson’s works and especially enjoyed his previous graphic memoir, Blankets, about his first love and loss of faith. When I read this blurb, I worried the niche subject couldn’t possibly sustain my attention for nearly 450 pages. But I was wrong; this is a vital book about everything, by way of ginseng. It begins with childhood summers working on American ginseng farms with his siblings in Marathon, Wisconsin. Theirs was a blue collar and highly religious family, but Thompson and his little brother Phil were allowed to spend their earnings from the back-breaking labour of weeding and picking rocks as they pleased. Each hour, each dollar, meant a new comic from the pharmacy. “Comics helped me survive my childhood. But what will help me survive my adulthood?” Thompson asks.
Together with Phil, he travels first to Midwest ginseng farms and festivals and then through China and Korea to learn about the plant’s history, cultivation practices, lore, and medicinal uses. As he meets producers – including a Hmong man whose early life mirrors his own – he feels sheepish about how he makes a living: “I carry this working-class guilt – what I do isn’t real work.” When his livelihood is threatened by worsening autoimmune conditions, he tries everything from acupuncture to psychotherapy to save his hands and his creativity.
This chunky book has an appealing earth-tones palette and shifts smoothly between locations and styles, memories and research. When interviewing growers and Chinese medicine practitioners, the depictions are almost photorealistic, but there are also superhero pastiche panels and a cute ginseng mascot who pops up throughout the book. Like Spent, this pulls in class and economic issues in a lighthearted way and also explores its own composition process.
The story of ginseng is often sobering, involving the exploitation of immigrants (in the Notes, Thompson regrets that he was unable to speak with any of the Mexican migrant workers on whom the American ginseng harvest now depends), soil degradation, and pesticide pollution. The roots of the title are both literal and symbolic of the family story that unfolds in parallel. Both strands are captivating, but especially the autobiographical material: Thompson’s relationship with Phil, his new understanding but ongoing frustration with his parents, and the way all three siblings exhibit the damage of their upbringing – Phil’s marriage is crumbling; their sister Sarah, who has moved 26 times as an adult, wonders what she’s running from. A conversation with a Chinese herbal pharmacist gets to the heart of the matter: “I learned home is not WHERE I am. Home is HOW I am.”
Both expansive and intimate, this is a surprising gem from one of the best long-form graphic storytellers out there.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review. Published in the USA by Pantheon (Penguin).
Smile: The Story of a Face by Sarah Ruhl
“Ten years ago, my smile walked off my face, and wandered out in the world. This is the story of my asking it to come back.”
Sarah Ruhl is a lauded New York City playwright (Eurydice et al.). These warm and beautifully observed autobiographical essays stem from the birth of her twins and the slow-burning medical crises that followed. Shortly after the delivery, she developed Bell’s palsy, a partial paralysis of the face that usually resolves itself within six months but in rare cases doesn’t go away, and later discovered that she had celiac disease and Hashimoto’s disease, two autoimmune disorders. Having a lopsided face, grimacing and squinting when she tried to show expression on her paralyzed side – she knew this was a minor problem in the grand scheme of things, yet it provoked thorny questions about to what extent the body equates to our identity:
Can one experience joy when one cannot express joy on one’s face? Does the smile itself create the happiness? Or does happiness create the smile?
As (pretty much) always, I prefer the U.S. cover.
Women are accustomed to men cajoling them into a smile, but now she couldn’t comply even had she wanted to. Ruhl looks into the psychology and neurology of facial expressions, such as the Duchenne smile, but keeps coming back to her own experience: marriage to Tony, a child psychiatrist; mothering Anna and twins William and Hope; teaching and writing and putting on plays; and seeking alternative as well as traditional treatments (acupuncture and Buddhist meditation versus physical therapy; she rejected Botox and experimental surgery) for the Bell’s palsy. By the end of the book she’s achieved about a 70% recovery, but it did take a decade. “A woman slowly gets better. What kind of story is that?” she wryly asks. The answer is: a realistic one. We’re all too cynical these days to believe in miracle cures. But a story of graceful persistence, of setbacks alternating with advances? That’s relatable.
The playwright’s skills are abundantly evident here: strong dialogue and scenes; a clear sense of time, such that flashbacks to earlier life, including childhood, are interlaced naturally; a mixture of exposition and forceful one-liners. She is also brave to include lots of black-and-white family photographs that illustrate the before and after. While reading I often thought of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Terri Tate’s A Crooked Smile, which are both about life with facial deformity after cancer surgery. I’d also recommend this to readers of Flesh & Blood by N. West Moss, one of my 2021 favourites, and Anne Lamott’s essays on facing everyday life with wit and spiritual wisdom.
More lines I loved:
imperfection is a portal. Whereas perfection and symmetry create distance. Our culture values perfect pictures of ourselves, mirage, over and above authentic connection. But we meet one another through the imperfect particular of our bodies.
Lucky the laugh lines and the smile lines especially: they signify mobility, duration, and joy.
My rating: 
With thanks to Bodley Head for the free copy for review.
Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich & Human Errors by Nathan Lents
Two recent books about our flawed bodies and the ultimate pointlessness of trying to control them…
Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control by Barbara Ehrenreich
A decade ago, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered a startling paradox through a Scientific American article: the immune system assists the growth and spread of tumors, including in breast cancer, which she had in 2000. It was an epiphany for her, confirming that no matter how hard we try with diet, exercise and early diagnosis, there’s only so much we can do to preserve our health; “not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.” I love Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die (alternate title: Bright-Sided), which is what I call an anti-self-help book refuting the supposed health benefits of positive thinking. In that book I felt like her skeptical approach was fully warranted, and I could sympathize with her frustration – nay, outrage – when people tried to suggest she’d attracted her cancer and limited her chances of survival through her pessimism.
However, Natural Causes is so relentlessly negative and so selective in the evidence it provides that, even though it’s sure to be considered for next year’s Wellcome Book Prize longlist, I would be unlikely to recommend it. In the first chapter, “Midlife Revolt,” which has been excerpted at Literary Hub and is worth reading, Ehrenreich writes of her decision to give up routine medical screening after a false positive mammogram caused undue stress. She decided once she passed 70 she was old enough to die without accepting a “medicalized life.” Moreover, she believes there’s an epidemic of “overdiagnosis,” especially in the USA, where there can be a profit motive behind testing. (This is certainly not the case in the UK, where the NHS doesn’t pester me about getting cervical smear tests to line any pockets; no, it’s about saving taxpayers money by catching cancer early and thus minimizing treatment costs.)
I love the U.S. cover. (Note the different subtitle.)
Ehrenreich goes on to argue that many medical procedures are simply rituals to establish patient trust, that cancer screening is invasive and ineffective, that there is little evidence that meditation does any good, and that fitness has become a collective obsession that probably doesn’t help us live any longer. It’s uncomfortable to hear her dismiss early detection techniques as worthless; no one whose doctor found cancer in the early stages would agree. The author also seems unwilling to confront her own personal prejudices (e.g. against yoga).
Although she uses plenty of statistics to back up her points, these usually come from newspapers and websites rather than peer-reviewed journals; only in two chapters about how macrophages ‘betray’ the body by abetting cancer does she consult the scientific literature, in keeping with her PhD in cellular immunology. Her most bizarre example of how our bodies aren’t evolutionarily fit for purpose is copious menstruation. Overall, the book is a strange mixture of hard science, social science, and, in later chapters, philosophy, as Ehrenreich asks about the nature of the self and the soul and what survives of us after death. As usual, her work is very readable, but this doesn’t match up to many other mind/body books I’ve read.
Favorite lines:
“The only cure for bad science is more science, which has to include both statistical analysis and some recognition that the patient is not ‘just a statistic,’ but a conscious, intelligent agent, just as the doctor is.”
“The objection raised over and over to any proposed expansion of health insurance was, in so many words: Why should I contribute to the care of those degenerates who choose to smoke and eat cheeseburgers? … we persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: Did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fiber? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death?”
My rating: 
Natural Causes was published in the UK by Granta on April 12th. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes by Nathan H. Lents
Lents is a biology professor at John Jay College, City University of New York, and in this, his second book, he explores the ways in which the human body is flawed. These errors come in three categories: adaptations to the way the world was for early humans (to take advantage of once-scarce nutrients, we gain weight quickly – but lose it only with difficulty); incomplete adaptations (our knees are still not fit for upright walking); and the basic limitations of our evolution (inefficient systems such as the throat handling both breath and food, and the recurrent laryngeal nerve being three times longer than necessary because it loops around the aorta). Consider that myopia rates are 30% or higher, the retina faces backward, sinuses drain upwards, there are 100+ autoimmune diseases, we have redundant bones in our wrist and ankle, and we can’t produce most of the vitamins we need. Put simply, we’re not a designer’s ideal. And yet this all makes a lot of sense for an evolved species.
My favorite chapter was on the inefficiencies of human reproduction compared to that of other mammals. Infertility and miscarriage rates are notably high, and gestation is shorter than it really needs to be: because otherwise their heads would get too big to pass through the birth canal, all babies are effectively born premature, so are helpless for much longer than other newborn mammals. I also especially liked the short section on cancer, which would eventually get us all if we only lived long enough. As it is, “evolution has struck an uneasy balance with cancer. Mutations cause cancer, which kills individuals, but it also brings diversity and innovation, which is good for the population.”
Lents writes in a good conversational style and usually avoids oversimplifying the science. In places his book reminded me of Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong and Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine. It’s a wry and gentle treatment of human weakness; the content never turns depressing or bitter. Recommended for all curious readers of popular science.
Favorite lines:
“While lithopedions [“stone babies”] and abdominal pregnancies are quite rare, they are also 100 percent the result of poor design. Any reasonable plumber would have attached the fallopian tube to the ovary, thereby preventing tragic and often fatal mishaps like these.”
“to call our immune system perfectly designed would be equally inaccurate. There are millions of people who once happily walked this planet only to meet their demise because their bodies simply self-sabotaged. When bodies fight themselves, there can be no winner.”
My rating: 
Human Errors was published in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on May 3rd. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 