Maureen Corrigan

Sometimes girls just want to 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, an intricately plotted debut novel by Carol Clare 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.

I thought Gary Steingart'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 Steingart'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.