Title: Yesteryear
Author: Caro Claire Burke
Genre: Contemporary, literary fiction, thriller, mystery,
Tropes: “tradwife” influencer, time-travel, manosphere, Christianity, authenticity,
Blurb:
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.
I don’t think I would’ve read this book if it weren’t for my mom and her friends, though it was I who suggested this book (after seeing this YouTube video discuss it) for our newly-formed book club.
The goal of this review is for me to understand my own thoughts of this book and the abundance of meanings hidden within. A digital version of notes, per se.
Anyway, I will try my best to make my notes clear and organized.
Spoilers ahead!
***
Authenticity
If you need to know one thing about the internet, it is that it is horribly unauthentic. Every post is curated to an audience, whether to friends or not. At the top of that pyramid are the content creators (me included).
Content creators, whether mere influencers or a teenager taking a selfie, set up a camera, make sure the lighting is perfect, and that they look good before pressing click. Though a teen taking a selfie is not quite on the level of an influencer, there is always fabrication when it comes to sharing something to the world, online or not.
Creating a physical scrapbook? Make it aesthetically appealing to your friends and family, picking only the good photos and color schemes.
Recording videos about books you like? Put some lipgloss on, write a quick script, and set up the camera and lights.
Going on a date? Make sure you look nice and try a new cologne in order to impress your date.
Perhaps not the best example, but something I’m just going to leave here: Just because one family is creating a technology-less environment for their kids does not mean it is possible to fully shelter them. The rest of the world has modern technology. That is not something that can be ignored, unless you want them to be locked away in some remote community for the entirety of their lives. As the children get older, it is arguably ethically correct to allow them to make the choice for themselves: to remain isolated or to explore.
I am not surprised authenticity is something Natalie struggles with. Especially when what you are pretending to be is unsustainable in the modern world. It is not necessary for survival to farm. For Natalie’s pioneer-era family, it is. Modern Natalie is just pretending to rely on the past ways, though it’s neither necessary nor truthful.
She is unauthentic online.
In the way she manages the farm.
In the way she cooks.
In the way she smiles.
Religion
Religion forms the backbone of not only this book, but the identity of women for thousands of years.
For years, women governed themselves by these sentences:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:22-24).
Among other “traditional wives,” Natalie Heller Mills takes this to heart. Natalie becomes the supreme subservient wife, holding down the fort while her husband lives his dream life homesteading. She turns to influencing in order to survive, as her father-in-law weans them off using his money as financial support.
However, something that stood out to me was the sexualization of God:
“When I was a girl, I thought of the Lord the way other girls in my class thought of crushes. I imagined the lines of His face each night when I fell asleep. I doodled His name in my notebook in cursive, swirling hearts in glitter gel pen pink. I wondered if He thought of me as frequently as I thought of Him” (Burke 258).
I thought it was interesting how Burke compared Natalie’s relationship to God as one that a schoolgirl. A sort of unbridled giddiness.
“And sometimes—as a reward, I think, for such pure thoughts—He would enter my body, filling me with an unbearable pleasure, a sense of communion so deep and animal and satiating that it left me slick and panting upon its departure. I stopped experiencing those moments the day I was married” (Burke 258).
Natalie compares the stability God makes her feel against that of her husband, but uses sex as the metaphor. It’s like how puberty changes the feelings of simply liking someone in middle school to desiring someone in college. Going from innocent crushing to horniness.
In her description, it seems like a her relationship with God became more intense and desirable. Until it wasn’t.
However, in my interpretation, upon getting married, she lost her connection with Christianity, and became more focused on her relationship with Caleb and her role as the “traditional Christian wife and mother” rather than cultivating and caring for her relationship with faith.
Feminism
Even though traditional wives should “submit [themselves] to [their] own husbands as [they] do to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22), there is a sort of retroactive feminism to Natalie’s turn to traditional gender roles and homesteading.
In the ways Natalie is a submissive wife, differing from feminism, her online presence is an example of her feminist freedom.
“All this time, I’d been under the impression that there were only two kinds of women who followed me: liberal women who hated me and good Christian women who loved me. But now I watched with surprise as a third woman opened the door to my brain and sauntered in: young, radical, educated” (Burke 273-274).
Then, Shannon elaborates, clarifying the beliefs of the aforementioned young, radical, and educated women:
“What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out” (Burke 274).
Shannon coins the term “the maze,” the robotic cycle of being confined to job or motherhood in order to secure survival. It is freedom. Escaping the maze would to “not to be a mother or a worker, at least not in any traditional sense. Certainly not to be both” (Burke 274). In Shannon’s view, escaping the maze, using Natalie’s life as an example, means to step away from a minimally flexible or unfulfilling life, and to instead devote themselves to sustainability, family, authenticity, and by working for yourself in a way that both feels fulfilling and pays the bills. However, as Natalie brings up, in order to truly live that life “is an expensive magic trick” (Burke 275).
Little does Shannon know, but that inspirational “freedom” she sees in Natalie’s life is almost totally fabricated in her online presence.
Womanhood
After Natalie hires the first nanny, Louise, she feels relief.
“I walked away from the living room, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The tension in my chest fell away, so suddenly and powerfully that I lowered myself to the ground, letting the pleasure roll through me in waves. I would never be alone with my children again” (Burke 264).
There a dissonance between having children and feeling emense relief to never be alone with them. If you don’t want to spend time alone with your very own children, why decide to have that many children?
It all leads back to the responsibilities that religion puts on women to become mothers.
Manosphere
To every feminism there is a manosphere. Arguably, before feminism, the world was the manosphere. Yikes.
The Twist
In short, I didn’t guess the twist. It caught me by surprise.
Was it a good twist? No. Not in the slightest.
It is cheap that it turns the mind-altering and thought provoking situation into a psychological mental issue.
Why doesn’t Caleb push back against the 1800s-simulation?
Why did Natalie willingly make herself even more miserable?
The Writing
Adequate. Love the metaphors and writing style. I enjoy the wittiness. No complaints.
Final Thoughts
I as a young person–a woman who neither wants children, follows a religion, nor desires to live a “traditional” life–I saw this book as a psychological horror.
Not only is the twist horrifying, but it is absolutely a terrible life to live without authenticity. Like Natalie, if I tried to pretend to be someone else all the time, I too, would be utterly exhausted. That is unsustainable.
In its shallowest form, Yesteryear is supposed to be a commentary on the authenticity of tradwife influencers. If you are looking for a “how will this woman escape” thriller or “escaping the Hunger Games-esque simulation,” then this is not your book.
In the immediate aftermath of finishing this book (as my Goodreads review mentions) was stunned, unsettled, and this book gave me a headache.
Quick notes:
- I listened to the audiobook, but I’ve drawn quotes from the Kindle edition.
- The Bible quotes come from the New International Version (NIV) edition.
Watch Elle Literacy’s fantastic video that inspired me to read this book!
Leave a Reply