Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is a book with an incredibly interesting concept: a tradwife influencer is transported back to the past she believes is better than the world of today. If pulled off properly, I believe people would have talked about this book for decades, establishing it as a literary classic. Unfortunately, I don’t think Yesteryear was successful in its exploration of the topic.
Throughout the novel, we follow Natalie Heller Mills, the influencer who promotes traditional living in family roles and farm life. One day, she finds herself in the past, a version of her family that exists in the 1800s—which should be everything she says she wants. Throughout the book, we follow both Natalie’s time in the past along with her journey in the present to become a wife, mother, and influencer. The book explores the hypocritical nature of influencer tradwives that populate the internet today by placing one of them in a world where only the husband truly has the power.
I did enjoy Burke’s portrayal of the complicated characters as Natalie is a riveting main character to follow. She resents her college classmates for their inability to see what she believes is the path to happiness: motherhood. And yet, soon after she gets married, she begins to regret marrying a man intellectually beneath her. She even regrets being a mother, possibly experiencing postpartum depression. All the while, she is telling the world how wonderful that life is. It is a beautiful push and pull between two extremes that creates a compelling character. Her husband Caleb is interesting due to his growth in seemingly the wrong direction. In the background, we can see him transform from a softer man who loves to play with his children, to a harsher, patriarchal figure after falling into the manosphere. The dichotomies between the sides of these characters is an excellent exploration of what enforcing of traditional Christian values can do to both men and women.
However, I feel as if several of the side characters are merely caricatures. Caleb’s father is a Republican aiming for a presidential run who genuinely feels like a straight up supervillain. He is simply the stereotype of a powerful, old-fashioned white man with strict traditional morals. There is no depth to him, unlike several of the main characters. Caleb’s mother is a housewife relying on drugs to make it through the day, which is just an exaggeration of the struggling stay-at-home wife. I had hope for Natalie’s eldest daughter Clementine who is against the filming and exploitation of children and their families; however, she ends up just being a plot device to highlight Natalie’s cognitive dissonance and abusive treatment of her kids. Clementine had a lot of potential, and it would have been a better experience if her story did not happen off screen. Similar to Natalie, I wish the side characters were explored more to provide a more holistic view into the aforementioned dichotomy.
Yesteryear was meant to be an exploration of the tradwife culture, and I believe it failed in properly doing so. While it told an excellent story for Natalie, there were many threads left untouched that were necessary to cover. In one of these threads, it is revealed that Natalie has sexually assaulted a female employee of Natalie’s who she found out was having an affair with her husband. Unfortunately, this event is not explored as much as I would like. Is Natalie attracted to women but trapped in a heterosexual, Christian marriage? Did her lack of control in the family lead to her taking control in whatever way she could by assaulting someone she employed who harmed her? There is so much to explore about Natalie’s position in the world through an incident like this, and that potential was wasted.
The ending reveals how Natalie has found herself in the 1800s, resolving the mystery underlying the story. However, instead of tying up these loose threads, the ending opens a whole new can of worms that no one has the time to examine rather than concluding the story that was built up in the rest of the novel. The ending feels as if it was chosen for shock value instead of a satisfying finish to the book’s themes.
No analysis of any themes ever goes deep enough. You can so clearly see the potential Yesteryear does not live up to.