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.

I love books about very specific topics so I was expecting to love this, but I couldn't get into the writing.

Dey Street Books provided an early galley for review.

The cover of this one looked enticing and grabbed my attention. As the turn of the millennium was approaching, I remember distinctly reviewing my company's software products to see if there would be an issue for our customers when the calendars rolled over to year 2000. I also remember that New Year's Eve as we watched other countries around the world hit midnight before the East Coast did, breathing a sigh of relief as each one passed with no evident disaster.

Despite the age-gap between myself and the author (in 1999, I could have easily had a daughter who was eleven), I can certainly connect to many of her views in her ten essays. I too admit to being an owner of Smash Mouth's Astro Lounge CD after all. And I see how most recent current events (the end of 2024) would make one nostalgic for their youth. Only for me, it would bounce two decades prior (1977 to 1986).

Shade certainly was thorough with her research. Even having lived through these times, there were several things that had flown beyond my radar. It was enlightening to have some things put into context with others.

This book discusses topics from the millennium, from politics to pop culture. I appreciated being reminded of major events in the 2000s, and I enjoyed the insight about how the changes then impact us today. I did not prefer the memoir bits of the book with so opinions about the politics of that time (even while agreeing with the author in several instances) as much as the objective analyses, but other readers may like that aspect. Overall, this book allowed me to reflect on just how pivotal the millennium was in so many ways.

Thank you NetGalley and Dey Street Books for the advanced review. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this -- it offered a great balance of well-researched and descriptive information blended with expected nostalgia coming from a millennial author whose formative years were during this "Y2K era". The author herself is just one year younger than I am -- so much of the personal stories she shares feel familiar to my own experiences or that of my childhood friends/family. I particularly liked that each chapter presented the reality of the time compared to how things "turned out", the attempt at foresight at the time versus how things actually turned out. While there is a fair amount of conversational subjectiveness, overall I found this a great supplemental read perhaps for younger readers who "missed" the Y2K era or older generations looking to understand a more center/progressive millennial perspective.

I requested this on a whim because I was looking for a nostalgia trip, but I was pleasantly surprised that the essays were much deeper than that! I'm a bit younger than the author - old enough to get most of the pop culture references while also being too young at the time to understand any of the political context, so it was really interesting to see the connections. Also apt timing to read about the Bush presidency and some of the comparisons to Trump later.

While I was reading this I had friends at When We Were Young Fest and I'm getting bombarded with anniversary album tours and a relaunch of Warped Tour. The essay about millenial nostalgia definitely resonated with me, as I'm always trying to keep the balance between "self-soothing" and hope vs. "trauma-induced age regression" or "a surrender to the world as it is" and not giving in to the nostalgia capitalism targeting our age group with full force right now.

I would recommend this to any millenials or anyone interested in the intersection of American politics and pop culture. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

I really enjoyed this essay collection. "Y2K" chronicles the years between the dot-com bubble (1997) and the housing bubble (2008). Colette Shade is an excellent writer. Her writing style felt personal and poignant. She really did her research. This book was fun, refreshing, and razor-sharp. There's a wide variety of topics in each essay from Starbucks, the aftermath of 9/11, pop culture, fashion, technology, reality shows, politics, climate change, gas-guzzling vehicles, etc. I like the balance of fact and opinion-based observations. Essay collections are usually hit or miss for me, but this one was hands-down a major hit. I had such a great time reading this. I could really relate to this essay collection because I am a millennial. And the cover art is absolute perfection.

When I saw this available to request, I jumped at the opportunity as a girl born at the dawn of the 90s.
Inside you'll find poignant essays that reflect the tumultuous era that was the millennium. I expected a much more light-hearted read, but was instead faced with tons of insight pertaining to how our culture (when I was an adolescent) truly shaped today's world.

I'm a huge fan of nostalgia, and this was right up my alley.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dey Street Books for an eARC in exchange for my honest review!

Y2K by Colette Shade was incredibly nostalgic to me. As someone who had grown up in the era being discussed, many of the events and topics were familiar to me, but talking about them in an almost academic way was fascinating. I loved Shade's thoughts on how the politics of the time intersected with the cultural moments. I highly recommend.