I really enjoyed this genre-bending series of essays about 90s/2000s culture, history, and politics. With the New Millennium celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, there are several forthcoming books on this period in history, and I think this is one of the best.

Y2K was an excellent collection of essays. I enjoyed the critique of the Iraq War, sexualizing popstars, paparazzi culture, and pressures to look a certain way. It was well researched and excellent on audio.

Honestly, this was a DNF for me. The subject spoke to me, mostly because I wanted an escape from current events. However, this book very much centers itself on the comparison of the nostalgia of Y2K compared to the way the world is now, both in the introduction and the first essay. There's a sharp bitter tang here that is not what I wanted out of this book. In fact, I was really hoping for something a little more candy-coated and fluffy. There may be plenty of that later on in the book, but for me, starting off with such sad-if-perceptive reflections was not what I wanted about a book that reflected my middle school years. There is plenty worth reading here, but right now I don't have the headspace for anymore sad analysis.

I really had a great time reminiscing on this trip down memory lane! With everything we're navigating these days, it's no wonder so many of us find ourselves longing for those simpler times. It's nostalgia at its best!

Thanks to Nergalley and publisher for allowing me to review this title.

The perfect book at a time when we might want to revisit our not-so-distant past. Ms. Shade's sharp writing in this collection of essays are a reminder of why I have long found her to be one the most insightful writers of our time.

As someone who is probably exactly Colette's age, this was an incredibly insightful (and nostalgic) look at such a specific era in time, and the long-term effects the thinking and ethos of this time has had on the current era. The essays dig deep into the aesthetics and fixations of the time.

I went in with the wrong assumptions about this book. I thought it would be “teehee didn’t the internet make weird beep boop sounds in the year 2000?” Instead of “here is a series of linked essays on how millennials got absolutely screwed”. Shade and I graduated high school in the same year and I recognize a lot of milestones we hit at the same time. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and sometimes it takes an author willing to confront the truth of an era to remind us it wasn’t all plastic furniture and alien charm bracelets.

“But millennial nostalgia feels different from boomer nostalgia. When boomer nostalgia was at its peak, its target audience was aging (a scary prospect for a generation whose identity was predicated on youth), but the world seemed, overall, to be improving. Their stock portfolios were growing, at least, and they had comfortable careers and housing equity and families of their own. (This experience, by the way, explains why the boomer cohort became more conservative with age.)…Millennials are aging now, too, but in a far more violent, precarious, and uncertain world. And so we look to the past for our hope, because hope in the future feels so hard to come by.”

This caught my eye, both for the cover and the premise. I am the exact target audience for this, having come of age right at the turn of the millennia. I was in the middle of high school when everyone panicked about Y2K. Every pop culture reference in this book brought me right back to the most formative years - middle and high school. This book is a series of essays detailing nostalgia, pop culture, and politics, and exploring what we got oh so very wrong. While I found it all interesting, I felt that the book cast a wide net and went broad rather than deep. It was sort of a mix of personal memoir and AP history, and I'm not entirely sure I understood the end goal.

I share the same elder millennial affinities as the author and enjoyed the book-- but wanted them to lean either more into the pop culture criticism OR memoir. It felt like it was aiming for the latter, which makes sense, but the writing and prose felt a bit stunted for what I thought going off the description of the book alone. Nonetheless, it's a pleasant read.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

One thing I think we’ve learned with books like this is that the author needs to make a firm choice between whether they are writing a book about nostalgia or one about cultural criticism. In theory the two should be able to coexist, but when books like this try to split the difference it just doesn’t work all that well.

Shade was clearly leaning more toward criticism, but she inserts so much personal information that it’s difficult to see this as an objective cultural critique. Shade is at her best when discussing topics where she seems to feel less personal connection (the climate crisis, forced patriotism underscored with racism). The things she seems to feel more personally connected to skew the criticism in such a way that it feels a lot more like personal disappointment.

To that end, a lot of the less successful parts of this book seem to stem from the fact that the author is clearly disappointed by the world currently (like most of us, I suppose), but also unhappy with how her own life turned out. “I thought I would be married,” she laments. “I thought I would get into Stanford.” While I can understand why anyone might feel disappointed by not finding the adult relationships they seek, it’s a little hard to understand why someone who says they were struggling to pass their high school classes and had to go to community college just to get their grades up enough to attend a four-year school thought that Stanford was ever a realistic option.

Whatever Shade was struggling with, it certainly isn’t about a lack of ability. She’s a very capable writer. That’s not the issue here. But even if you empathize with the crushed dreams of it all (however realistic or unrealistic), it’s sort of a tough assignment to effectively blame all your individual disappointments on a cultural era. While there are some truths connected to this idea (certainly the 2008 recession put a lot of people behind where they expected to be professionally and financially), but it feels silly and tired to blame issues of self worth on, I dunno, low-rise pants.

In all, I think Shade tried to be both Kate Kennedy and Chuck Klosterman with this, and ends up missing the best parts of what they both did with One in a Millennial and Nineties, respectively. The fact that this book has no sense of humor is perhaps the biggest miss (both Klosterman and Kennedy are consistently entertaining and display a sense of humor about their subjects). Klosterman seemed to be able to separate the material from his personal feelings, which helped his account feel more honest and objective. But interestingly Kennedy, who takes the most personal approach of the three, ended up making a lot more salient points than Shade did, perhaps because she took a more nuanced approach.

I think overall, this book was pretty good. Admittedly, I am on the older end of Gen Z, so not a millennial. Overall, I feel like this maybe leaned more memoir through a cultural lens than the pop culture essays I expected. I will say, I really enjoyed the perspective of liberal politics in the Y2K era in contrast to where we are now. I think the framing here was wrong, but I did enjoy what it was.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dey Street for the ARC of this title.

I really loved the essays in this collection - it does a great job (a la Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties, which it references) of taking two seemingly disparate pieces of y2k culture and finding the hidden connections between them.

I’m at the tail end of Generation X so a little older than the author. I come at the years described in this book (late nineties to 2008) as a young adult starting college to a young professional pregnant with my second child. That said, these essays were fine but overlong and not as culturally attuned to the time as I was expecting. When the essays discussed the sexualization of teenage girls and the relevance of “bling”, they were interesting, but would invariably attempt to make points that weren’t quite there. Overall, it was a good collection that could have been better. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

*3.25
Overall, I really liked what the author was trying to do, but it fell a bit flat for me. The essays needed a stronger and consistent narrative voice.

I recieved this as a digital galley from NetGalley.

OK- I maybe I read this book too fast because I didn't even remember I read it until I was looking back to catch up on reviews? Not the best sign I think.

But when it was fresh in my mind i gave it three stars? That's something...I guess?

I really wanted to love this book. When I saw the cover and description of Y2K by Collette Shade, I immediately thought, "Finally, a major publishing company allows a fellow millennial to write narrative nonfiction with pop culture analysis!" I am five years older than Colette, and our life experiences as a youth, not to mention our genders, are different, but still, we're both millennials.

I want to credit Dey Street Books for giving a millennial that opportunity. Unfortunately, Y2K tries to be too many things. There are two really good narrative non-fiction chapters about a family member becoming absurdly wealthy in the infancy of the tech sector and another about how mass media to young women led to her teenage eating disorder.

Shade grew up in a very well-educated and extremely progressive Universal Unitarian family. She touches on this several times, and there's a humorous chapter where she learns everything about sex through the church when all others were promoting purity culture. These were the kinds of stories I was hoping for.

Two chapters discuss the excitement of logging on to the Internet and going to Starbucks for the first time. I vividly remember those experiences, as do most millennials.

However, rather than continuing in a narrative nonfiction style, these chapters are deconstructed into an upper-level college political science or sociology lecture by a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I presume she was attempting Chuck Klosterman-style philosophy, especially in his book about the Nineties. Unfortunately, it becomes a Mad Lib of progressive talking points and self-flagellation. It is her first book, though.

There are brief flashes of her capturing the excitement of the early Internet, mass consumerism delivered to millennial teenagers, the realization that we weren't bulletproof after 9/11, and the global financial crisis, during which many millennials (myself included) had to move back in with their parents and apply for any available job.

But all eventually devolve into historical lessons from prior generations. Shade's not smug by any means, but many of these digressions were before our generation was born.

Hopefully, more presses like Dey Street will give millennials opportunities to write similar nostalgic books. Eventually, someone will hit a topic like this out of the ballpark, and I look forward to reading that book. Shade's book was a noble effort but fell short for me. There are a bunch of four-star ratings, so maybe different strokes for different folks.

I want to thank Dey Street Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Y2K was an interesting look at the way the events of the Y2K era impacted our modern world. Unfortunately I found that this book did not deliver on it's advertising as a collection of essays that looked at pop-culture and their lasting impacts. I was expecting to see essays discussing the continued paths that early pop-culture from this era have lasted and shifted and shaped how and why they turned out that way. We got a few chapters about this - I would say the discussion of paparazzi and celebrity culture moving toward reality stars and influencers was the closest to fulfillment on this premise. As someone who turned five in 2000 not all of the references were for me but I appreciated the author's use of footnotes and perspective as a teen at the turn of the century.

The rest of the book was incredibly focused on politics and the impact of the excess of the late 90's and early 2000s on the eventual 2008 recession and the rise of conservatism that came along as well. At times it felt a bit smug with the author telling us that she hated Hummers at 15, that her parents were liberals who made fun of Bush and gave her better sex education and got her interested in birding, that her uncle made millions in the dot com bubble that she was able to graduate without student loan debt. Something that at the final essay when she discusses her struggles in graduating into the recession mentions her inability to get a good paying job in the same lines as her peers (who are implied to have the student loan debt) turning to sex work or Uber driving. This part really did rub me the wrong way and turned me off a bit, probably dropping this down a star because I wished there was a better look at her own privilege in the way she talked about politics.

I will say a lot of the other political discussions were very well written. I also found the chapter discussing her disordered eating and the Russian supers of the 2000s being plucked from the poverty of the former USSR.


For someone who is looking at a more politics focused essay collection on the Y2K era this would definitely be a hit. I can also say this would likely also be a hit for someone a bit older than myself more of a peer with the author because I am sure there are references without footnotes that went over my head.

The author is a little younger than me, so my memories of this time period were through a vwry different lens. But I enjoyed her perspective and discussion.

Colette Shade found (what I think is) the perfect balance of nostalgia, pop culture references, and insightful historical context and analysis with this book. As a younger millennial, I witnessed many of these events but was too young to really understand the full cultural and political impacts of everything happening. Shade did an excellent job at diving into the highs and lows of this era with thoughtful research and a critical but witty tone. This book was more serious than I anticipated, I expected more of a nostalgic look at the pop culture of the time, but what Shade delivered was even better, by examining the underlying forces contributing to these pop culture phenomena.

Thank you to Dey Street Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I liked this and yet didn't care for parts of the book that came across as long lists of things like items.and, world events. . Moreover, I would have preferred more of the authors personal experiences without the parts that felt like classroom lectures.