My friends and I have a joke that one wrong like on Instagram can ruin your whole algorithm. It’s a joke but it’s at least a little bit true. Linger too long watching a reel of some woman in a sparkling kitchen making sourdough and suddenly Instagram thinks I want to quit my job, have 5 more kids, and give up my voting rights. I’m on social media enjoying my freshly baked bread and vaccinations and suddenly every suggested account is telling me to drink raw milk.
Natalie Heller Mills is one of those women on social media. She and her husband are raising their 5 (with one on the way) kids on an organic farm in Idaho. They homeschool, they drink raw milk, she makes sourdough bread. They’re raising their kids with traditional American values and Natalie is documenting it all online. Her online persona is a carefully crafted image and one she is selling to more than a million followers.
But then Natalie wakes up one morning in a house that is almost her own but not quite, with a family that is almost her own but not quite. Instead of her perfectly renovated and picturesque home, this is a homestead. No electricity, no running water. It is the traditional American life she has been pretending to live but now, it seems, she is really there. Is this a reality show? Or a test from God?
There has been a ton of hype around this book, unusual for a debut author. I think it has definitely benefitted from coming out precisely at a time when we’re beginning to question a lot of these online narratives and the so-called tradwives who push them. There is increasing backlash around children being featured on high profile social media accounts and certain political groups are definitely using these influencers to their advantage.
As a reader who is also a mother, wife, Christian, and baker of sourdough, I was definitely intrigued by the concept of Yesteryear. I get the appeal of these perfectly polished accounts but I also don’t follow anyone that could remotely be described as a tradwife. In Yesteryear, Natalie refers to the Angry Women who follow her and comment online. We become privy to the massive amount of effort it takes Natalie to maintain her persona and we are taken back to her own childhood and her early 20s and better able to understand why she has become someone willing to put that effort in.
Yesteryear was a fast read for me. That question of what is really happening to Natalie propelled me forward. I don’t think the final reveal was a twist exactly as Burke does a decent job of sprinkling clues so that we can figure it out. More than anything, I found myself recalling Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl with its steady reveal that the characters are not who or what we think they are. There are not likeable characters in this story but I didn’t necessarily mind that here. The drive wasn’t to find someone to root for but to figure out how we all got here.
Where the story fell flat for me was in its depth. I think the role and influence of tradwives and social media influencers in our current society is a fascinating thing to delve into and one that is very “of the moment”. We know that voices online are affecting what we eat, how we raise our children, who we vote for. These aren’t experts, they’re just people with smartphones and we are allowing them to alter our lives. In the case of tradwives, they are very often selling a lifestyle that they themselves aren’t living. They may be playing the role of submissive wife-at-home, but their social media accounts are the real financial earners for their families.
Unfortunately, Burke doesn’t give us deep enough characters to really dive into these issues. Natalie’s husband, Caleb, was particularly disappointing. There are hints of who he is and how he ended up where he did but they’re only hints. The story is told in Natalie’s first-person perspective so we learn the most about her but more than once I found myself confused by another character’s motivations. We might know the motivations that Natalie assigns to them but we also know that her perspective is entirely skewed. A character perspective shift such as in Gone Girl could have added a lot here.
In the end, I wanted a book that provided commentary on this style of influencer and online lifestyle and instead I got something more like a thriller featuring a tradwife. Fun and absorbing but not a story that has given me much to think about after I close the last page.
Karissa Reads Books 
You haven’t turned me off of this one for two reasons: 1) I recently read that horror novel called Trad in which the tradwife is jealous of more popular women, so she accidentally makes a wish to a demon to impregnate her. 2) This one is coming up at a book club I’m going to, and the woman who runs it is the one who loaned me Trad, so we have both read it.