Cammy Sitting Shiva

• Author: Cary Gitter
• Genre: Contemporary
• Publication Date: August 26, 2025
• Publisher: Alcove Press

Thank you to NetGalley and Alcove Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This stirring debut novel is an unflinching, darkly funny look at loss, family, and coming home—perfect for fans of This Is Where I Leave You and Competitive Grieving.

When Cy Adler dies, it’s a shock to everyone, especially his daughter, Cammy. Almost thirty, slightly aimless, and stuck in a basement apartment in Queens, she’s forced to return to River Hill, her one-square-mile New Jersey hometown, to sit shiva. Cammy’s fraught relationship with her mother, Beth, has never been easy. And now, with her beloved father gone, she would rather be anywhere but back in her childhood room, in a house filled with guests noshing on snacks and offering their condolences. So Cammy does whatever she can to make it through seven turbulent days of mourning.

Amid getting stoned, reconnecting with her best friend and her high school crush, evading the rabbi, and spending a debauched night in Atlantic City, Cammy must reckon with her roots—with the place she fled for the glamour of New York, where she thought she belonged. But is she really any better off than those she left behind? While navigating the swirl of emotions that accompany grief, Cammy also uncovers hidden truths about her father, which lead her to doubt how well she knew the man she adored. Then again, does she even know herself?

Fueled by wry, lively prose, Cammy Sitting Shiva is a deeply relatable fish-out-of-water story, grappling with how it feels to be adrift and to find that a hard trip home may be what it takes to anchor you.

I was so prepared to love this debut novel. For me, there was a lot of identification with the premise of the story, and I love the idea of centering sitting shiva, a Jewish mourning ritual, as the main setting for the story. After a loved one dies, the family members sit shiva, but the customs are different depending on the tradition that you align with, whether it is orthodox or reform. Shiva comes from the Hebrew word for 7, and is done in the first 7 days after burial. Mourning family members are supposed to sit on low seats, keep mirrors covered, not cook or clean, and engage in prayers. Other requirements are to wear a shirt that has been torn to symbolize tearing your clothing in grief. Family and friends come to the house to mourn together, remember the loved one, and process their grief. After the first week, there are other rituals, some of which are done within the first 30 days after death, and still more within the first year. Also immediate family is supposed to keep a candle burning at all times in the first month after someone dies. 

Having lost my father in 2019 after a long struggle with cancer, shiva was held at our house. I was prepared to further identify with Cammy and see her own grief process, as well as potentially having my own grief kicked up. As reform Jews, the customs are a little different from the ones that I’ve practiced, but at heart it is the same—providing space for loved ones to process a loss and grieve while being supported by family, friends, and other congregation members. Unfortunately, I struggled more with Cammy than her loss that mirrored my own.

Cammy is nearly 30, and living in Queens while she works temp jobs in Manhattan. When her father suddenly passes away, Cammy isn’t prepared for the loss, but she’s also unprepared for the emotions that come up when she goes home. Like me, Cammy really got along well with her father, and their relationship was a great one, with a lot of shared interests. Her bond with her mother is much more strained, making it unbearable to have to spend a week in her parents house in North Jersey with just her mother, and a bunch of people coming through the house each day. 

Cy, Cammy’s father, served as a buffer between his wife, Beth, and his daughter. He was able to defuse the tension, and make it easier to spend time together. Without his calm, funny presence, Cammy feels incredibly lost and unable to broach the distance between herself and her mother. In addition, as anyone who moves away from home and comes back for a visit knows, it can change your perspective and make you reevaluate your choices.

When Cammy returns home, she receives an email from her high school English teacher, following up on her favorite student. She sees familiar sights in her small town, and many of the same people she’s known her entire life, because things move differently in small town New Jersey than they do in NYC. Reflecting on her adult life, she isn’t very satisfied with her progress. She’s wanted to be a writer for her entire life, yet hasn’t been able to complete a work. 

My biggest issue with the book was Cammy herself. She isn’t a very likable character, putting her own desires ahead of the needs of her loved ones. Although everyone has a different trajectory in life, I can just open Facebook to see how dissimilar my life is from the people I went to high school with—some are dead, some have health issues, some moved away and are living their best life. A long time ago, someone told me not to compare my insides to someone else’s outside, and that is never clearer than on social media: the people I follow post all the highlights of their life, and rarely share their struggles. Cammy could really have used that advice. It wasn’t until almost 80% of the book that Cammy shows enough change that I started to like her. Until then, she’s selfish, rude, and negative to everyone in her life.

Granted, coming home at nearly 30, only having a string of temp jobs, torpedoing a great relationship, and not having even one finished work can be a huge letdown. I can see how she feels as though she hasn’t made any moves that will further her future. Her best friend Fran runs an Italian deli, and has dreams of opening a restaurant. Even the losers in town don’t seem so bad, and Cammy proceeds to not only measure her insides to the outsides of others, she judges the people around her, and not always just in her head.

Whenever I’ve sat shiva, the visiting mourners help out around the house—providing food to immediate family, straightening up, sharing the best and funniest memories of the deceased, and ensuring that support and comfort is available. I found a lot of solace in all the people coming by, and creating a more joyful shiva. We cried plenty, but we also laughed a lot. Cammy seems to have her own struggle with social anxiety—instead of seeing comfort and love from the guests, she views a house full of people as a nuisance and insurmountable obstacle. So she finds a way to avoid it: she leaves the house. The first 3 days of shiva show readers how selfish Cammy is when she abandons her mother and goes out instead of being at her father’s shiva. 

While reading, I kept getting frustrated and angry at Cammy for acting so irrationally and being mean to literally everyone who cares about her. One of my favorite things in a book is seeing the character grow and become a better, stronger person. And while it does eventually happen, it took so, so long for her to even show the first twinge of change. Even her thoughts were twisted up. 

Overall, this was a pretty good read if you can handle Cammy at her worst. I can’t help but think that Gitter went a little too far with how unlikable Cammy is for so much of the book. I enjoyed the story, but for me this could easily have been a 4 or 5 star read with some small changes. The exploration of how people manage their grief was important, because that is so much of the story. While I knew that my father was terminal, I couldn’t imagine just losing my dad suddenly one day. I got the chance to sort of prepare myself for his death, even though no matter how much notice you have, it’s still a shock. Luckily, I didn’t burn down all my bridges during my father’s shiva like Cammy does in this book, but if she wasn’t so unlikable, her change wouldn’t be so pronounced, which I would have appreciated a bit. There is a great discussion of Jewish mourning traditions and reform Judaism, so the representation is good, and gives readers a look into mourning rituals for less observant Jews (orthodox and Haredi Jews observe all of the 613 commandments, while other groups pick and choose). I also loved the relationship between Cammy and Fran, and I could just picture Fran with a heavy Jersey accent and the blunt attitude that New Yorkers tend to have. It made it more meaningful when she says something to Cammy, since it’s clear that she is relaying her concerns and coming from a place of love. I would have liked to see Cammy shape up a little sooner in the story, but it was a good debut, and I think Gitter has a lot more to offer, so I’ll definitely be checking out her next book. Let’s just hope the MC is a bit more likable. 

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