Maureen Corrigan

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.

Almost every other passenger aboard is a woman of a certain age, otherwise diverse in race, politics, ability, income bracket, and even sexual orientation.

All were rabid boy talk fans.

The crew's 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.

The 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.