Yesteryear

An assembly of words by Caro Claire Burke

No one on earth needs my thoughts on Yesteryear.

But I’ll give them to you anyway.

Photo by malwina nogaj on Unsplash — I think this is a picture of a tractor. I hope it’s a tractor. Whatever it is, I want one.

This is the worst book I have come across in the last few years. Terrible writing. I mean, terrible writing. A plot that feels like someone is pulling random paragraphs out of a garbage can. The characters that are the most flat, inane, undeveloped, idiotic, difficult to care about people in the fictional world. A description of religion that feels like a fourth-hand description of what a person might be like if they were religious. Scenes of abuse of all kinds that feel like news clippings pulled out of a Bingo roller.

So why is everyone reading this?

I’m not sure I know.

But my guess is that the book is wearing a giant sign that says, “Come! Look at this woman and we can all hate her!”

And everyone is coming. And everyone is hating her.

And even my dislike of the book falls right into that same trap. Here I am pointing a finger at Caro Claire Burke and saying that her fictional world isn’t good enough for me.

Did I read (half) the book just so I could hate it? Did you read it so that you could hate the main character? Did your friend read it so that book club would be a really juicy discussion of all the people there are to hate?

Bottom line: Everything about this book is depressing — its existence, the fact that we read it, that everyone is talking about it. The fact that I’m talking about not liking it.

So, here’s a picture of a globe mallow bee in the globe mallow in my yard. Because globe mallow bees make me really happy. And maybe I’ll write a book about that.