🌾 Yesteryear 🌾

• Caro Claire Burke

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‘Life on this ranch feels less like a life and more like a nightmare, a contrived stage performance, a scene that never ends.’

Yesteryear is the book that everyone seems to be talking about right now, and this one has been on my radar for a while – even prior to its release this month. It follows Natalie Mills, a tradwife influencer, who is transported back in time to the era which she has so romanticised – the harsh pioneer 1850s. Her perfect husband, her perfect children, even her charming farmstead… everything is slightly off. It’s an absolutely explosive premise, especially in this modern age where so many of us are fed tradwife content, which I think is why it’s gained so much traction online.

Natalie’s father-in-law is running for president, and comes from an extremely wealthy and influential dynasty (think the Kennedy’s). As such, Natalie and Caleb are extremely wealthy, which Burke uses to explore the fact that this type of lifestyle is incredibly privileged and almost exclusively reserved for those with generational wealth. The perception Natalie gives online that they don’t have any outside help on the farm – where in reality they have upwards of thirty workers at any given time – is also heavily touched upon. I really loved how Burke explored if Natalie’s online content furthered her father-in-law’s career, and influenced his promotion of traditional Christian values and nuclear families.

Natalie herself is an incredibly unlikeable protagonist. She’s self-absorbed, narcissistic, occasionally cruel and her inner dialogue is incredibly vicious. In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of likeable characters in this book, except Natalie’s children. She presents herself as someone wholly different to who she is, gentle, loving mother and wife. In fact, she’s disparaging of everyone around her and unbearably supercilious. She’s still fixated on things that happened in high school and college and is deeply unhappy with her life, despite how picture perfect she makes it look online.

Yesteryear’s real strength lies in how uncomfortably close it is to home. We’ve all seen those types of videos on our FYPs – women churning out children so much that even they seem to have lost count, making things from scratch, milking cows and collecting eggs from chickens. Yesteryear offered a fictional? glimpse into the behind the scenes of such content – I say fictional? because I think it’s probably a quite accurate representation.

In the end, I don’t think Burke actually draws any conclusions about the ethics of tradwife culture, but rather allows the reader to make their own. That could be an issue for some people but I personally really like those types of books. I touched on this earlier in my wrap-up, but the conversation around the choices Natalie made for her children and the exploitation of the children in online content was really interesting to me, especially considering the choices Clementine, Natalie’s eldest daughter, made in the end.

Have you read Yesteryear, and if so, what did you think? It seems to be having quite a divisive effect among bookstagram and booktok, with some loving and some being disappointed – which camp do you land in? 🐄