REVIEW: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

JennieA- Reviews / Book ReviewsFiction / psychological thriller / Satire13 Comments

FYI, this was meant to be a review but ended up mostly being a meditation on the online debate over this novel.

Yesteryear was a rarity for me on two fronts: I don’t often read books that have this much buzz (it’s #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list as I write this), and I don’t listen to audiobooks. But I had a long road trip for work, and I happened to have the audio version of this book, so I thought…why not?

I specifically mention it being an audiobook because I really enjoyed the narrator, Rebecca Lowman, and I think she contributed quite a bit to my feelings about the book. It’s hard to know if I would have liked it less on paper (well, on a screen); I also wonder if parts that felt a little slow or repetitive would have felt less so if I were reading the book. I say that because it’s an almost 14 hour audiobook, and I can’t imagine it would have taken me that long to read it.

All this prelude is just me being weird because I never listen to audiobooks and I want to be honest with myself about how much the medium affected my enjoyment. My guess is: it’s probably a mixed bag.

Anyway, let’s start with a 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.

Natalie could fairly be called an anti-heroine. From the first page she can be…difficult to like (the word I’ve seen more than once in online commentary is “monster”).

But I actually did like Natalie, in a weird way. I found her very funny, if unintentionally at times, and oddly resilient. I viewed the whole book as satire, and within the confines of satire I was less concerned about things like how terrible a mother Natalie was or how incredibly judgmental and condescending she was to everyone around her.

When I was reading Yesteryear, Natalie reminded me of Amy Dunne of Gone Girl. Amy was another anti-heroine (or just plain villain) that most readers hated. I always kind of liked Amy, too. Both are at their core very angry women who lose it after trying to push themselves into being the sort of women that society expects them to be. (In Amy’s case: the “cool girl” and in Natalie’s the perfect trad wife.)

When I started Yesteryear I had only heard positive buzz, but by the time I finished it I started to see a lot of backlash online. Charges included: the author hates and tortures her main character, her portrayal of religiosity is unfocused (you never learn exactly what type of Christian Natalie is, which I didn’t think mattered much but apparently some readers do?), and that she is insufficiently knowledgeable about tradwives, influencers, and Idaho geography.

It’s a lot. As someone who enjoyed the book and, again, viewed it more as a satire than any kind of deep examination or interrogation into the subjects it portrays – some of the criticism has left me bemused. Did I read it wrong? Do I just have shit opinions?

(I wonder if the author hasn’t helped her case by some of her public statements – she gave an interview in which she said that her “toxic trait” was loving Caleb, and that he just wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, the poor thing! While it’s true to Natalie’s condescension to her husband could be cringey to read at times, I didn’t find him at all lovable. He was an idiot and Natalie did have to manage his idiocy for her own sake and that of her eventual children. And his idea to be a kindergarten teacher seemed motivated by him thinking it was an easy gig where you just played with kids all day. Again, he was an idiot.

And so now I’m arguing with the author about her own characters.)

On a more practical note, I’ve read that some readers felt that the resolution to the time-travel mystery was weak. I thought it made sense (and was heavily telegraphed, though I didn’t really put the pieces together myself ahead of time).

I did have an issue with the ending of the book, where

I can separate my enjoyment of Yesteryear from what I do think are fair criticisms of the book. Natalie is a bit of a paper doll rather than a fully realized character. When I added the blurb at the beginning of this piece, I was struck by the first line, “…and I was perfect at being alive.” This felt false, since Natalie’s perfection is only a facade she presents for a relatively small period of her life. (Maybe that was the point, though.) But Natalie’s take on the world – her anger, her rigidity – none of this is delved into very deeply.

So that brings me is a question – what was the deal with Natalie, anyway? Her religiosity is inherited from her mother, but never seems to go below the surface level. While she prays to God and Jesus on occasion (and imagines them intervening in her life) she’s definitely a “talks to God when she needs something” type of Christian. (No judgment; I’m not even religious or Christian and I find myself praying for divine intercession on occasion, usually involving baseball games.)

Just yesterday I saw an online comment diagnosing Natalie as a narcissist and…hmm. I think narcissist is way, way overused by lay people  (I am not myself qualified to diagnose anyone with anything and yes, I’ve called people narcissists before). But when I look at the main traits listed under narcissism – the need for admiration and (even more so) the lack of empathy – Natalie ticks those boxes. There’s certainly something wrong with her; I’d say it’s a combination of nature and nurture but probably more of the former than the latter. Put plainly, the girl ain’t right.

None of the negatives takes I’ve read on Yesteryear, even the ones I think are fair, have diminished the memory of how much I enjoyed it driving home from Palm Springs, so I’ll give it an A-/B+

Best,

Jennie

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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