10 Razor-Sharp Social Critiques like Yesteryear

Camille Deming is the perfect wife, cooking, cleaning, and running her homestead. She shares her tradwife lifestyle with her online followers. But there’s one thing missing that all tradwives have in common: a baby.

Despite what she shares on social media, she and her husband, Graham, aren’t on good terms. Camille knows that, without a baby, her tradwife platform will never grow. That’s when she discovers a well in the field behind her house and wishes for a child.

Soon, she starts having strange feelings—and even weirder cravings—until a creature visits her one evening. Her pregnancy announcement gets more engagement than anything she’s ever posted, so what if she suddenly starts eating raw meat?

In what Stephen King called “The best horror of 2026. Hands down,” Camille will have to decide what being a tradwife is worth.

Our narrator passes her time sitting at a computer, working an unfulfilling job at a women’s lifestyle website. 

One night at a bar, she receives a message through a song from pop star Adriana Argento and quickly gets lost in her online fandom.

Soon, she’s invited to join a group of superfans who worship Adriana over candlelight and listening parties. But what starts as a way to make friends becomes something far more sinister.

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to achieve literary stardom together—but only Athena has made the bestseller list, while June is a nobody. 

So when Athena dies in a freak accident, June decides to steal Athena’s just-finished manuscript, about the overlooked contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. 

No one wants to read a basic white girl story, June thinks. So what if she rebrands as Juniper Song, with an ethnically ambiguous author profile? 

The story needs to be told, at whatever cost. But when evidence of her real background emerges, her newfound success is about to nosedive—unless she can stop it.

Samantha Heather Mackey doesn’t quite fit in at Warren University’s small MFA program in New England. It gets worse when she meets the rest of her fiction-writing cohort—a clique of annoying, rich girls who call each other Bunny. 

But when Samantha receives an invitation to join their Smut Salon, she gets sucked into their world and abandons her friend Ava. Finally, her dark imagination has company as the girls take part in rituals that spawn their monstrous creations.

Soon, Samantha won’t know what’s real and what’s fake—and she’ll be forced to choose between Ava and the Bunnies in this “cult classic” (People). 

Mallory Maddox has hit a writer’s block, or more like a wall. It’s been seven years since her book came out, and her literary stardom is fading. She needs to find a way to stay relevant.

That’s when she meets Leo, a struggling addict living under a bridge, who makes his money through sex. She’ll use him, and his story, to write another bestseller.

But as secrets surface, threatening not just her career but her life, Mallory must decide how far she’ll go. Caro Claire Burke, the author of Yesteryear, celebrated this as “a seething, hilarious, and wildly shrewd takedown of modern identity culture.”

Rikki Fitzpatrick’s cousin, Lisa Tilton, died just before her wedding—and Lisa’s mom knows why. Using a program called Killer Body Weight Loss, she was advised to follow an extreme diet plan, which caused a heart attack. 

So her mom enlists Rikki’s help to write an investigative exposé. At the helm of the company is Julie Larimore, an idealized image of feminine perfection. 

To uncover Killer Body’s cover-up, Hill expertly addresses “a contemporary issue (is slim the only way to be?), [with] intriguing characters, and clever plotting” (Publishers Weekly).

On her 26th birthday, the unexpected happens when Dana is pulled from her life in California, 1976, to antebellum Maryland. There, she is tasked with rescuing Rufus, the heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. 

But she learns her ultimate purpose is to protect Rufus, ensuring his assault of her Black ancestor, so that one day, she will be born. As she faces the traumas of slavery, Dana must fight to return to the present. 

“Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).

Now a major motion picture starring Amy Adams, Nightbitch is “a must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural” (Vulture). 

A successful artist, the mother pauses her career to care for her newborn. Two years later, she hides in the bathroom, away from her toddler’s cries, when she notices a patch of hair on her neck and sharp canines. 

When she tells her husband, he dismisses her fears. But as the mother’s symptoms grow, and she struggles to keep her alter dog identity hidden, she decides to find a cure at the library.

 That’s when A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography enters her life, and with it comes a group of moms who are more than they seem. 

At 40, she has a life anyone would envy, complete with a successful career, good looks, beautiful kids, and, above all, a perfect husband whose wealth lets her transcend her circumstances. 

It’s been 15 years, and she’s as in love as ever—but worries he doesn’t feel the same way. Determined to keep the spark alive, she plans every encounter they share, keeping them both on their toes, until one day she pushes it too far. 

Lovers of “Caroline Kepnes’ You or Gillian Flynn, will find My Husband to be a new, satisfying, and unnerving take on the relationship-suspense genre” (Booklist, starred review).

Lizzie and Bex were once inseparable. But after college graduation, Bex vanished—only to rebrand as a tradwife influencer named Rebecca Sommers.

Years later, she’s amassed millions of followers who obsess over her perfect husband and ranch life. Meanwhile, Lizzie is a struggling magazine writer, with kids who compete for her attention. 

One day, Bex calls Lizzie with a career-making offer: an interview with her and an invite into the elite MomBomb influencing conference. But when Lizzie arrives at the conference, things seem off.

When Bex goes missing and Gray is found murdered, it’ll be up to Lizzie to learn what happened to them, in a “saucy plunge into the backstabbing, smoke-and-mirrors world of social media” (Boston Globe).