YESTERYEAR, debut novel perfect for book clubs...and Anne Hathaway as Natalie comin' soon!

YESTERYEAR
CARO CLAIRE BURKE
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

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 Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? 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 brutal 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a rotten human being Natalie is, phony, all about surfaces and appearances. And then one day, she's required to put in the effort she's faked for life as a momfluencer/farmfluencer. Remember Overboard, the 1987 film? Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as truly terrible people, lying, cheating, using people around them as objects. This story reminded me of that, with Outlander as the backdrop.

There is a thing called a "tradwife" on the internet. It's as brummagem as the "manosphere" the right-wing owners of major media outlets likes to insist is worthy of attention so their employees yap on about it. Natalie and Caleb, her husband, are mouthpieces for this made-up cultural phenomenon. As will surprise no one over forty, the couple are complete fakes: the lifestyle they present as aspirational, as somehow attainable, is a profit-driven collective endeavor of many minions and two public faces, supported by a cast of their minor children exploited as accessories, as decorative objects.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It's got elements of the whole Ruby Franke debacle, the various terrible men in the right-wing talk circles, the young kids trying to be famous on YouTube because that's what they see as fame...none of this is different than it's ever been. Classes, courses, camps, schools teching acting, writing, cooking...mor acccurately chefing...all have done this since who-knows-when but certainly since Carême parlayed his successes serving super-fancy vittles to the power elite of the Napoleonic era into a publishing empire. Others came before, I'm sure. Humans like looking up to people who do things flamboyantly and publicly because the spectacle is fun, because we like novelty, because we enjoy the inevitable fall from the heights. I myownself have never felt more intense schadenfreude than I did at the fall of Beau Brummell. The word "comeuppance" was only coined in 1859, but might as well have been invented for him...and for Natalie.

As Natalie awakens to the reality of her comeuppance, she becomes...authentic, at least briefly, in her intense desire to get back to being artificial, groomed, and pampered. She'll take the misogyny, the fakery of her persona's religious trappings, wrap herself in the cocoon of decepetions if it will bring her back to luxury behind the cameras. The hollow and unsatisfying Caleb of the modern day? Fine, compared to the sterner and more effortful relationship with her nineteenth-century Caleb; and how the hell does anyone get raised in a world without nannies? Natalie doesn't want to know.

I'm painting a portrait of a woman as obsessed with surfaces and self-absorbed as any Dorian Gray. She is just as awful as he was. We know this because we hear her inner monologue. We are left in no doubt that her responses are genuine because there is no camera to play to, no audience except us, the invisible readers she is speaking to.

I am definitely the audience for this story: anti-religion, revolted by the fameseeking culture depicted herein, accepting of a premise that promises weirdness in the form of time travel. But there are limits. Yes, Natalie and Caleb exist in the world...Ballerina Farm...but this story's got to do more than regurgitate the headlines to succeed. Does Author Burke have anything to add to the conversation? Or are we here for the fun of Natalie's comeuppance? The ending is designed to offer that perspective, I think, but it did not land with me. That's why I only offer four stars.

Not being perfect, not sticking the landing is not in any way meant to vitiate the real pleasures of the read. It's the kind of story that book clubs will engage with eagerly, much to chew on, much to consuder. I think you're wise to pick it up in that context; this is a story best experienced as a catalyst of discussion.

Debuts that attract Anne Hathaway to adapt and then star in their film are rare. I see why this one won that lottery. Find a group to read it with!