Sometimes, girls just wanna have fun, right? I've been in a springtime mood of wanting to dive into a cartoon-colored ball pit of comic novels with spunky heroines. And I found some good ones; but what I also found is that, much like the classic screwball comedies of yore, escapism in these playful novels links arms with edgy social commentary.
Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke
Yesteryear, an intricately-plotted debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has been getting lots of attention — and deservedly so. The main character here is an online trad wife named Natalie Heller Mills. On camera, Natalie revels in activities like spending four hours making a loaf of sourdough bread and then adorning it with a nativity scene made out of herbal stick figures — from her own garden, naturally.
A little of this goes a long way for those of us who share the attitude of the late Joan Rivers. Rivers famously quipped: "I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again." Amen.
So imagine my glee when Natalie — who only plays at being a pioneer woman — wakes up one morning to the realization that she's been transported back to the year 1855! Welcome to the real pioneer life where, if you want milk for your morning gruel, you'd better hustle out to the barn and find a cow.
If Burke had only stuck to this plotline, Yesteryear would be a fun one-note snark at retro lifestyle influencers; but instead, it tells a more ambitious, suspenseful, and, yes, ultimately melancholy story of its heroine's aspirations and capitulations to ideas of how women should live their lives.
American Fantasy, by Emma Straub
I thought Gary Shteyngart's brilliant 2024 essay in The Atlantic about his agonizing seven nights aboard The Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, had ruined me for all other tales of enforced frivolity on the ocean; but I was wrong. Emma Straub's latest novel, American Fantasy, starts off sharing Shteyngart's cynicism and ends up affirming the right of women — especially middle-aged women — to party without self-consciousness or apology.
Our main character here is a 50-year-old divorced woman named Annie who's been persuaded by her younger sister to join her on a four-day themed cruise. The "theme" is on board: namely, a gone-soft-'round-the-middle boy band of the '90s named Boy Talk that both Annie and her sister loved.
Almost every other passenger aboard is a woman of a certain age, otherwise diverse in "race, political views, ability, income bracket," even sexual orientation. All were rabid Boy Talk fans. The cruise production manager, a gay woman named Sarah, reflects that:
These were the guys who had launched a million sexual awakenings, and even if they had awakened something other than heterosexuality, they had still been present, like distant guardian angels of puberty.
Straub tells the story of the cruise through the eyes of Sarah, Annie and one of the band members, a thoughtful guy named Keith who, like Annie, is at a crossroads. This is a novel that makes the radical move of honoring, rather than ridiculing, female fandom. Here's Straub's description of Annie's epiphany about her own fandom as she's standing in a packed crowd during a Boy Talk performance:
[T]he music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life. ...
All around Annie, women were dancing and singing, and for a second, she closed her eyes and thought, No one else will ever understand this, except, of course everyone standing beside her, who all understood it perfectly.
Enormous Wings, by Laurie Frankel
I've shared the premise of Laurie Frankel's forthcoming novel, Enormous Wings with a few friends. Based on how instantly they entered the book's title into their cellphones, the premise is all you need to know about this wild-but-all-too-timely story about female autonomy or lack thereof. So here goes:
Frankel's heroine, Pepper Mills, is 77 and a reluctant new resident of the Vista View Retirement Community in Austin, Texas. Surprisingly, she meets a nice man there and has sex. And, then, through a medical fluke that Frankel almost makes plausible, Pepper finds herself pregnant. Her doctors expect the pregnancy to end in miscarriage; when it doesn't, Pepper seeks an abortion. But, she lives in Texas and she's now such a media sensation that it's almost impossible for her to leave the state.
Complicated, gutsy and entertaining, Enormous Wings pokes fun at life's unpredictability and stokes anger at situations that aren't at all funny.
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