u/2beagles

Very nonspecific spoilers of Yesteryear!!

I just finished Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. While it's a great book and deserves all the growing praise, it turned out to not be at all the book I had been anticipating. Can anyone point me to a book that might be what I thought Yesteryear was?

Things seem quite dark lately. The current state of culture and politics is getting to me. >!I really wanted a smart, funny, pointed, schadenfreude novel spearing the performative online culture, particularly regarding tradwives and the manosphere. I got a dark, emotionally complex, surreal novel about how badly this culture can go. It's an excellent book. I love an unreliable narrator. !<

I still want the fizzy, mocking, comeuppance novel my soul craves to pull me back from nihilism! Any suggestions?

I emailed a version of this to KF on Monday, but I keep thinking about it.

My daughter is a young teenager. I have been listening to KF for 6+years and sharing some of it with her. It's an intimidating time to raise a child. We are inundated with propaganda and conspiracy theories. We get more fractured and isolated into different experiences of reality all the time. Then there's the daily fresh horrors of late stage capitalism. Our media and government are more and more blatantly owned by very few oligarchs and kleptocrats. Laws certainly do not apply equally. It's so easy to be either completely cynical or blissfully unaware or entirely unable to analyze and fully consider the information constantly being pushed at us.

But I had this to help. Other stuff, too, of course. But there were two guys who were willing to put tremendous time and effort into deeply looking at one of the sources of conspiracy, hatefulness, and philosophy of white Christian nationalism. They disagreed, one very passionately, but respectfully with each other. They stepped up fully when it really mattered for the Sandy Hook families. We watched a lot of trials together and listened to the Formulaic Objections together and discussed the legal system.

And it was funny and delightful and I love being able to celebrate when a person is super enthusiastic and informed on a singular topic. We regularly lament the squatch's lack of heroes...

So, the show is gone. I think I will see echoes (I already do) in how my daughter approaches truth claims and political arguments. She can tell what is just annoying and what is completely unacceptable. And she is angry about the inequality in our justice system. Maybe she'll do something with that as she gets older.