Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – #20BOS26 No 7

Well – I’m rather relieved that is over!

Yesteryear is this year’s most hyped novel.

• Is it worth the hype? A guarded YES – as it has a lot to say…
• Was it an enjoyable read? NO – I found it profoundly irritating in the extreme!
• And the twist? – I shall remain spoiler-free in this review.

As this novel is our #20BOS26 Buddy read, there will be a discussion post in early August where spoilers will be encouraged so we can discuss it freely.

Natalie Heller Mills has millions of followers on social media. A mega-influencer, she is the queen of Yesteryear Ranch, the Idaho farm run by her and her husband Caleb, together with their five children, with a sixth on the way. Natalie promotes a wholesome, conservative, Christian lifestyle – that of the ‘tradwife’. Her role is that of mother and homemaker. submissive to her husband.

Or is it?

Right from the beginning, we realise that the image Natalie is presenting is idealised, the reality is not quite as presented. For instance, there are two nannies behind the scenes dealing with the children, there are Mexican farm hands doing the actual work of growing the farm’s not as organic as they’re made out to be vegetables, Caleb, being the youngest son of a rich state senator who hopes to run for the presidency, does virtually nothing, Clementine, their eldest is now a teenager and rebelling against their lifestyle, and and then there’s Shannon…

Shannon is a college drop-out with pink hair, but she knows her stuff, and has been filming Natalie daily to create content, and producing that wholesome image, the art of sourdough, bread kneading etc. We’re aware that something has happened between Shannon and Natalie, but we have no idea what until much later. Add in the internet trolls, who love to criticise everything Natalie represents and would like nothing more than to take her down, and you can see we have a situation building. End of part one.

Part two: Then one morning, Natalie wakes up and nothing is quite right. The ranch is her ranch, but it’s older, undeveloped. Her husband appears to be Caleb but is different, older. The children – where are they? There should be five plus a bump, but there are only four and the bump isn’t there any more! The oldest isn’t Clementine, she’s the world-weary Mary, the two boys are Noah and Abel, not Samuel and Stetson, and the youngest is Maeve, not Jessa or Junebug. What’s happening? This is not her Yesteryear! Help!

There’s that little girl, standing by the doorway. The same one who called for me earlier. She’s wearing one of those strange pilgrim outfits, hair fully braided. My heart squeezes in a sort of heartsick revulsion, the kind I felt in the early days of postpartum with Clementine. That innate instinct to love a child, especially one who looks like you, coupled with the overwhelming desire to kill the needful thing, to bash its head in and run.

I won’t dwell on this thread of the story, but having read Kindred by Octavia Butler earlier this year, in which a young woman is transported back to the times of her slave ancestors, I was wondering if something similar had happened to Natalie…

Meanwhile, the story moves forward, but chapters set in this new present for Natalie alternate with her own life story, beginning when she persuaded her conservative Christian parents to send her to Harvard, where she was shocked by the students’ attitudes, having to put up with her roommate Reena having it off with a boy she brought back from a party in their shared room! Yeugh!

…I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kinds. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out.

It’s there she meets Caleb, and falls for his good looks. It’s not until after they’re married that she realises he’s a work-shirker, and that a normal job will never work for him, he’d toyed with the idea of becoming a kindergarten teacher, which Natalie doesn’t think a fit job for a man. That’s when she remembers that he’d expressed a dream to have a farm, and she persuades his father, to lend them the money to make it real, and $5 million later, Yesteryear Ranch in Idaho is born. Her father-in-law, Doug, will of course demand reparation later for this act of seeming generosity.

We carry on alternating between Natalie then all the way up her timeline to where we started, and Natalie in the horror of her new now – where she really is expected to be the tradwife. It’s a rude awakening for her in every way. There is one scene which made me giggle in this new now, where Natalie spots the jar of yeast starter in the kitchen and decides to make a loaf, she adds ‘a sprinkling of sea salt’ to the dough. I thought, ‘Gotcha!’ There’d be no ‘sea salt’ in a landlocked pioneer kitchen, just sayin’.

As a debut novel, Yesteryear is a real achievement, however, that doesn’t mean I liked it. Although, as I said at the top, it really was a page-turner, it’s pacy and darkly funny in parts—I just had to know what happened, and how. As a character, I really disliked Natalie, although I could sympathise with her confusion and panic in the new now. I found her obsession with imagining what poor Reena was doing now profoundly irritating, although that will come back to bite her later. Mind you, the author has clearly made her unlikeable deliberately. Natalie also isn’t the best advert for motherhood—there’s an interesting role-reversal going on with Caleb being more in touch with his feminine side at first, and Natalie the influencer being dominating, although she fervently believes that she’s doing it with God on her side. She does come to a realisation, wittily put, which I shall leave you with as a tempter…

Liars. Every Christian woman I ever met had been a big fat lying bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat lying bastard souls.

I’m really looking forward to discussing this novel more freely next month, including the whole tradwife mindset (and the related manosphere for that matter). For now I will just say that its resolution disappointed. But it was a fun ride getting there.

Source: Own copy. 4th Estate hardback, 394 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.