First and foremost, we must give credit where credit is due. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear has a premise that must have other authors fuming with jealousy. Her protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a housewife and mother on a remote ranch who posts “tradwife” content on social media, pretending to be the ideal American mother while playing down the fact that she has two nannies and a lot of family money from her in-laws to help. One day, she wakes up in what feels like an alternate universe where her husband is older and meaner to her, her children are different, and there is no modern technology. It’s 1855, and this phony “tradwife” is going to have to become the real thing.
It’s not hard to see why a publishing company jumped at that pitch, nor is it hard to understand how the book has become such a publishing phenomenon. But does the book live up to the hype?
I’m not so sure. My main issue with Yesteryear is with its protagonist. I had a hard time getting a read on her and which of her beliefs are sincerely-held. A lot of that is intentional, and it does make more sense by the end of the story, but that brings me to my second issue. The pacing feels very off. This isn’t really a long novel, but it’s a little light on incident for its page count. The result is a story that seems to drag quite a bit, which is further exacerbated by the switching between timelines. At the same time, it also felt like Burke was skimping out on things that might have made her novel a more entertaining read, like actual scenes of her influence lifestyle or a more-developed look at life on the ranch in 1855.
Yesteryear is a hard novel to talk about without spoiling, but suffice it to say that the plot has a few tricks up its sleeves. Nothing that is going on is exactly what it seems. But all that narrative trickery tends to undercut the irresistibility of the novel’s central idea. While the novel’s ending does a decent job of wrapping up loose ends and retroactively making sense out of some confusing aspects of the story, it comes a little too late in the day to truly render the experience of reading the book an enjoyable one. I think many readers will also agree with me that the novel is a bit of a bait-and-switch, where the novel we were promised would’ve been a lot more interesting than the one we got.
