Didn't like YESTERYEAR? Read these books instead.

For your summer reading consideration.

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

Are you tired of hearing me talk about Yesteryear? Well, it's your lucky day because today I am not talking about it, per se, but about books that may appeal to readers who opened Yesteryear thinking they were going to get the book that was marketed to them: a time-travel literary novel that would interrogate fourth-wave feminism and the right wing resurgence in tandem, exploring the motivations of women who want to return to the past while honoring the women who actually lived that hard, hand-to-mouth existence.

Lol. Anyway.

Showing some (not all) titles with some degree of similarity to Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, but in a good way. Maybe not a #1 NYT bestseller way, but the NYT isn't the arbiter of good taste.

Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Yes, this is a middle-grade novel. But middle-grade novels can be, and often are, absolute bangers. Jessie has lived her whole life the early 19th century, but when the children in her village begin to fall deathly ill with diphtheria, her mother tells her a terrible secret: it is not 1840, but 1996, and Jessie and her family have been living in an analog simulation of the past. Trapped by men who seem to want to do her family harm (but why??) in a “living history museum” where mention of the present is forbidden, Jessie has to make her way back to 1996 to find help for her sister and friends.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Another middle-grade banger, but this one about actual time travel, and possibly my favorite time travel book of all time. I really can't tell you too much about it without giving away too much, I think, but let me just say this: Miranda is a gem. I want her mother to be happy. You might cry. New York in the 70s seems… frightening.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Though not a story told by an unreliable narrator in the strictest sense, this bizarre and multi-narrated novel is a delightful exercise in learning to understand a heroine whom surely no one can much like. Bernadette Fox is brilliant, biting, and agoraphobic. At the outset of the story, she has also been missing for weeks, and her teenage daughter thinks the clues to her disappearance might lie in her correspondence.

A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings

A chilling yet hope-filled memoir—you know all along that she got out, but sometimes you could be forgiven for forgetting—of a former tradwife who escaped her abusive husband's violence and religious fanaticism. This is a hard read (child death, domestic violence, and emotional abuse all play a role in Levings’ story) and an unflinching look at some of the most dangerous dominionist cults that have come out of Christian fundamentalism. It is also a vital read for anyone trying to understand some of the men currently making decisions at the top of the U.S. government.

Educated by Tara Westover

Another hard-to-read, but impossible-to-put-down memoir, this one set in the actual state of Idaho. Westover was intensely isolated in a Mormon family in the mountains for much of her adolescence, and her story is a brave and piercing one. I'm due for a re-read.

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner

Want a gripping story of an actual (fictional) pioneer wife? Sarah Prine's diary traces her family's emigration west in the mid-nineteenth century, her young marriage, the raising of her family on a homestead amidst the Indian Wars, and the slow maturing of her intellectual life as she reads everything she can get her hands on. It's a complex story of a complex time in American history, and doesn’t neatly tie up or whitewash the many atrocities that took place. The sequel is not as good.

Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza

The original tradwife influencer novel, this thriller starts off strong with a murder mystery and manages to pack an impressive amount of character growth and backstory into what might seem at first to be a boilerplate page-turner. Lizzie and Bex went to college together, but their friendship ended soon afterward, when Lizzie entered the world of journalism and Bex married a wealthy rancher and became a barefoot mama Instagram sensation. I felt the ending was a little too tidy and far-flung, but I’m eager to read more of Piazza’s work.

Somewhere Past the End by Alexandria Faulkenbury

Gently compelling, this dual-timeline novel explores a terrifying topic—a doomsday cult—with compassion and nuance. Alice, who has lived her whole life in Brother Richmond's Collective, was left behind when the others were seemingly raptured. She's also pregnant with a baby she was forbidden to have. Trying to escape the commune and figure out what actually happened to her family, Alice's story is told in tandem with that of her mother, who joined the cult years before as a young woman seeking a place to belong. I was initially nonplussed by this work, lyrically written though it was, because the ending didn't provide the answers I wanted. The longer I sit with it, the more I realize that was the point.

Trad by Elizabeth Richardson

DISCLAIMER: I haven't finished this one yet, because it hasn't been fully released! Elizabeth Richardson has been publishing her novel a chapter at a time on her Substack, and though I have enjoyed what I've read so far, I have to give the honest caveat that I don't know where it will end up! Hannah, a journalist covering social media influencers, dives deep into the world of tradwife motherhood content by creating her own fake online persona—where the lines quickly begin to blur between Hannah's reality and her alter ego, homeschool mama and sourdough baker Martha.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

The quintessential unlikeable narrator, Juniper Hayward is an aspiring writer eaten alive by jealousy of her more successful friend Athena. When Athena dies suddenly, June gets the devious and dreadful idea to finish and then pass off Athena's novel manuscript as her own. The problem, apart from the plagiarism of it all, is that Athena, a Chinese-American, was writing a deeply Chinese book. It's fine for Juniper to just imply to the world that she's Chinese to boost her own credibility, right? This book is twisted in all the right ways, and though the themes are heavy-handed, R. F. Kuang pulled off the satire and unreliability of it all far better than... other authors I could name.

Howard's End by E.M. Forster

Hear me out—this book is about the performance of femininity in a way Yesteryear was trying to be, and failing. I know it was written by a man, but sometimes Edwardian dudes made some good points, you know? It was grand to be an Englishman in 1910, and all that. Anyway, Margaret and Helen Schlegel are high-class, intellectual, and broke. Their friends the Basts are wealthy, middle-class, and at first too friendly, then not friendly enough. There are destroyed wills and broken engagements and falling in love with the wrong people, and it's a sad novel but also a very satisfying one in a weird melancholy way. I really need to see the Emma Thompson movie, and still haven't.

And that's my list! What would you add to it?