Yesteryear is the debut novel of Caro Claire Burke, and is centred on a delightfully fiendish “what if”. What if a popular American tradwife influencer one day found herself living in actual pioneer times? Such a simple conceit, and yet so thoroughly engaging.
So it pains me to say: this book completely squanders its brilliant premise.
I really loved the setup, following Natalie, a woman pretending to be the perfect housewife while hiding nannies, microwaves, pesticides and farmhands juuuust out of frame. I should have loved the story of her downfall. Instead, as the book progressed, I felt a sick twist start to form in my stomach.
The first shift comes when we hear of Natalie’s first birth and her subsequent textbook postnatal depression. A truly harrowing experience for any young mother, and one that I thought might finally inject a little humanity into the caricature that was developing. Instead, it is handled with so little care that it becomes the first hint that the novel is less interested in understanding its subject than in punishing her.
Things don’t improve. As the story crescendos towards its truly awful final twist, it becomes increasingly clear that Natalie isn’t really a character at all. She’s a literary punching bag. The satire gives way to something meaner, abandoning curiosity in favour of contempt.
I won’t claim to have done extensive fact-checking on my gut instinct here – that the author perhaps just deeply despises tradwives. I’ll leave that to the BookTok sleuths. But from what little looking I’ve done, I seem to be on the right track.
And that saddens me, deeply.
What could have been a fascinating and genuinely feminist interrogation of the tradwife phenomenon through satire instead becomes a mean-spirited pile-on, where domestic violence, rape, drugging, and all manner of suffering inflicted upon this admittedly awful woman are somehow supposed to satisfy the reader.
Well, this reader was not satisfied.
1 sassafras out of 5.
