Is Yesteryear Clean? Profanity and Content Guide for the Audiobook

Danny Ellis 2 min read
Verdict
Heavy

A substantial share of the book gets filtered, and most listeners will choose to skip a meaningful amount.

13h 47m audiobook, 284 filtered segments, 5.4% of the runtime gets skipped at full strength.

I picked up Yesteryear expecting a slow-burn historical drama, and for the first hour or so that is exactly what Caro Claire Burke delivers. Then Chapter 2 hit, and I started counting. That chapter alone flags 26 segments, which told me early that this was not going to be a quiet ride. By the time I reached Chapter 31, there is a scene running four and a half minutes that I would describe as the book's most sustained heavy moment, and it lands without much warning. At nearly 46 minutes of filtered content spread across 266 tagged segments, Yesteryear earns its Heavy verdict and earns it honestly.

The bulk of the filtering falls on sexual content, which accounts for more than 28 minutes on its own, most of it in the severe category. Profanity is constant rather than clustered, so you will notice the skips distributed across the whole runtime rather than concentrated in one bad chapter. There are also six slur segments and three hate speech segments that are human-reviewed and brief but genuinely unpleasant in context. Substance use runs long when it appears, clocking nearly nine minutes total, which suggests those scenes are written as extended sequences rather than passing references.

My honest recommendation: if you are listening alone and you turn on full filtering across every category, you can finish the book and get the same book, same narrator, same story Burke wrote. But this one is not clean enough to listen with kids in the car, and I would not hand it to a teenager without the sexual content filter active at minimum. Mature adult listeners who want the complete story with the rough edges taken off will find the full filter stack does real work here.

What we filtered

Category Mild Moderate Severe Total Time
Profanity 52 70 49 171 1m 45s
Slur 0 0 4 4 3s
Blasphemy 34 13 0 47 39s
Violence 4 9 1 14 4m 10s
Sexual Content 7 8 15 30 27m 15s
Romance 0 1 0 1 5s
Crude Humor 6 0 0 6 27s
Substance Use 6 2 0 8 8m 58s
Hate Speech 1 1 1 3 1m 9s

Profanity, by word: 35 f-ck, 31 G-d, 27 sh-t, 22 b-tch, 21 h-ll, and 66 more across 14 other words. (Word-level filters let you keep some words and skip others. Your library, your rules.)

The heaviest single chapter: Chapter 48, with 26 filtered segments across all categories.

The longest single scene we flagged runs about 4m 35s in Chapter 31 and falls under sexual content.

What you get back when you filter Yesteryear on AudioHaven

  • Same book, same narrator (Rebecca Lowman), same story.
  • About 44m 30s of total filterable runtime, which you choose to keep or skip by category and by severity.
  • Real-time skipping. The book plays straight through, with a soft cut where each segment lives.

Listen to Yesteryear on AudioHaven

Same book, same narrator, same story.

Try it free for 14 days. Finish the book.

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