I was raised in conservative evangelicalism. YESTERYEAR missed its mark.
A review of Caro Claire Burke's bestselling novel about a mother who idealizes the past.
This review contains spoilers, both for the plot of Yesteryear and the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy it.
I opened Yesteryear thinking I was diving into a time-travel novel that would deliver some biting wit about the hypocrisy inherent in tradwife social media content. The premise on which I had been sold involved a woman who broadcast her picture-perfect, old-fashioned, “traditional values” life on Instagram to millions of followers, but woke up one day in 1855 (or was it 1805? Publicity material couldn’t seem to make up its mind) and had to figure out what happened to her real life and how to get it back.
I’m fascinated by this topic, because to a certain extent I have lived it. I grew up in a home-church, nondenominational, evangelical Protestant environment. That mouthful basically just means I was homeschooled, very sheltered from the outside world, and we had church in our kitchen—sometimes with other families, sometimes not. As a teenager, figuring out my own path, I leaned very hard into the precursor to tradwife content: the Stay-At-Home-Daughter movement, an offshoot of the conservative homeschooling world which preached that a girl’s purpose was to grow up to be a godly, feminine, submissive wife and mother. She would not be over-educated in a liberal college environment, nor would she work outside the home. Her place was one of domestic bliss, freed from the chains of modern feminism, and thriving as the gentle guide of her household (but deferring always to her husband, of course). I thought it was the closest path to God. I ate it up. This was before Instagram, so I read every blog I could follow, completed the Bible studies, devoured all the books on courtship instead of dating and why higher education is a scam. Wanting only to be a better Christian, I failed to see how so much of this ideology was crafted to keep women in their place, to twist faith into a cage. (That realization would come later, but it’s not the focus of this piece today.)
And, as an adult who had slowly shed these beliefs as she matured, I thought this was what Yesteryear was all about.
I thought I was going to read about the hypocrisy that dogs so much of viral “homesteading mama” content; the marketing behind the dreamy captions about living life slowly and feeding your children organically; the way that so many young women in high-control religious groups have been sold a diabolical lie about the path to happiness.
I think perhaps, at one point, Caro Claire Burke thought she was writing that book.
Sold as a satirical thriller, at first blush the book seems to do all of those things. Natalie Heller Mills, the main character of Yesteryear (based not-so-subtly on Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm) is a somehow-Harvard-educated1 Christian woman who has married the son of a conservative politician and started a lifestyle brand on Yesteryear Ranch. Nannies take care of her children behind the scenes while she films motherhood content; the organic produce the farm sells is riddled with pesticide; Caleb, her wannabe cowboy husband, is a blithering idiot diving down the internet rabbit hole into the online manosphere. Natalie, the book’s narrator, divides her inner monologue into Real Life Natalie and Online Natalie, holding herself together—just barely—with the reminder that her audience is always watching. Her millions of followers, that is. And the Lord, of course. But not her church family—not her pastor or bishop or elder—because she doesn’t have one.
It’s funny, isn’t it, that a novel about a tradwife influencer would never once bring a church into the equation?
Once I saw this gap, I couldn’t unsee it. The other little details (I’ll get to some of those) paled in comparison to the glaring lack of any spiritual force tying Natalie to her rigid expectations for herself. The greatest hint we ever get about Natalie’s religious community is the Bible study group she reluctantly attends at Harvard (where she considers the other Harvard students “stupid” with no further substance). There is no older woman mentoring her and urging her to joyfully submit to her husband; no fire-and-brimstone preacher threatening hell in her dreams; no stacks of marriage books dictating her relationship with—her servility to—her weak-willed husband. There is no religious oversight in Natalie’s hyper-conservative bubble, one that—in the real world—is defined by religious oversight, only King James Bible verses plucked out of context and an occasional silent appeal to God.
Who, exactly, is Natalie’s God? What kind of theology did her college self want to study? What religion is driving the nebulous convictions her family adheres to?
Is Natalie Pentecostal, with her long uncut hair? Is she Catholic, “blessing herself” before prayer and refusing to use birth control and watching her mother chug hard liquor (??) at church functions? (And if so, why is she so confused by the college drinking culture, since she is clearly no stranger to her mother’s binges?) Is she Baptist, with a total-immersion adult baptism that somehow bizarrely happened just before she went to college despite having been raised in this nebulous unnamed faith? Is she Anglican, since she references a priest and not a pastor? Is she Mormon, living with her handsome blond husband from a political family, in a region of Idaho that does not actually exist? (Geographically, Yesteryear Ranch is impossible. A nitpick, certainly, but worth adding to the bonfire.) What Christian denomination believes that denying your child siblings is child abuse?2 The girls in her Harvard dorm are unsure of Natalie’s exact beliefs. Caro Claire Burke isn’t—she planned it this way. Started writing, stopped researching, as she said to Kirkus Reviews. Because she doesn’t care.
“I spoke to a lot of Mormon and evangelical women to get a baseline understanding of the requirements in a fundamentalist Christian community. But I didn’t want Natalie to be a specific religion. It’s meant to be a little vague. Once I started writing, I stopped researching.”
All of those fundie denominations, she breezily told The Rumpus, are basically the same.
“I realized very quickly that whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them. There are, of course, minor differences, but the more you learn about it, and the more you interview women, and listen to podcasts—I was even lurking on Reddit threads of women who had left these communities—and you hear the same story again and again about what the expectations are.”
Except, of course, they aren’t. And the people who have emerged from life under FLDS control, or Bill Gothard’s Baptist clutches, or the cult-like Reformed intensity of Christ Kirk in Moscow, Idaho (!), the Vision Forums and Advanced Training Institutes and Institutes for Basic Life Principles and Ladies Against Feminism—they all have a story to tell that is clearer and more deeply personal than Natalie’s vague appeals to “the Lord” to forgive her for saying “fuck” when she just took His name in vain three times in the last chapter.
“That isn’t an unreliable narrator,” writes Holly MathNerd in Yesteryear is Not a Novel. “That’s a narrator with zero continuity of consciousness.”
It is obvious that Burke had an axe to grind against Christian fundamentalist tradwives, but by skipping over the fertilizer that grew their beliefs, she erased the object of her parody. You cannot satirize a shadow-thing. You cannot reverse-engineer a spiritual scrupulosity starting with the outcome you need for the plot.
A reader who knows nothing about conservative Christianity could be forgiven for thinking that maybe Caro Claire Burke just could not write about this unless she lived it. I don’t actually believe that. I think she was quite capable of writing this story in a way that made sense; the problem is that she did not choose to. There is an abundance of books out there that do catalog the intricacies of growing up in this kind of lifestyle: memoirs by Jill Duggar, Shari Franke, Tia Levings and Tara Westover all explore, in great detail, the kind of rules and restrictions that accompany high-control religious living– and it does not seem that Burke drew on any of those to write this novel. In attempting to satirize #EveryChristianWoman, she painted a portrait of no one.
It all could have been explained so easily, by the way. To do away with the details of a specific religious sect would have been as simple as a passage that mentioned how the Mills family worshiped at home, because the nearby churches were too liberal or too conservative or too whatever-you-like. Starting one’s own system of leadership because the available options are perceived to be not good enough is a valid case for critique and I would have been interested to see that explored. As it is, the total lack of any regularity in worship, any family prayer or marital fight ended by a simple “God says you have to obey me” makes Natalie and Caleb read like a sloppy caricature rather than a well-honed satire.
“Oh, but that’s the point,” some readers have said. “Natalie’s a hypocritical and unreliable narrator, so of course she doesn’t really believe any of this stuff.” But that’s just it. Natalie does believe. She believes… something. What Natalie believes is the train that carries the story to its disappointing end: every twist and turn of the plot is based on the world Natalie perceives. And that world is riddled with references to God; at one point she hallucinates Him in Mary’s face on the steps of the 1855 farmhouse. Once she determines that her apparent dive into the past is not actually a reality show, she becomes convinced that this experience is a test from the Lord. But of course, we know better, at the end. The whole experience was borne out of Natalie’s extreme mental illness, and the fact that her family was drugging her without her knowledge for fifteen years.
For the reader who thought they were going to sink their teeth into schadenfreude, it’s a slap in the face that gets more comical with every outlandish choice. Natalie’s narcissism is brushed under the rug along with her family’s culpability in disabling her. The older sister shows up with a warrant, but no cops, and takes the kids! No one ever tries to look for the Mills family, who disappeared from modern life but are still living at the exact same address! Natalie receives a thirty-year prison sentence for child abuse3 carried out under the influence of drugs she didn’t choose to take! Caleb, who has always known what year they are living in, is… never heard from again!
“Who cares?” some might say. “It’s a thriller. We don’t need character development.” Laying aside the irrefutable fact that this book is making waves in the literary world, and being interrogated against the zeitgeist as few genre novels could ever hope to be, I would argue that character development always matters. It is on character development that fiction hinges!
I know we are supposed to hate Natalie. She’s an awful person. She is self-obsessed. She is not kind. But if Christian fundamentalism is truly what she was born and bred into, then she has also been manipulated, lied to, and let down by the people around her—and that includes an author who failed to give her a believable interiority. If her story were more realistic, she would be at the beck and call of a patriarchal system that gives women a platform if and only if they “keep sweet, pray and obey.” If her course had run true to life, it would have been flagged at every turn by men assuring her they were her authority, reminding her that she was created to serve them, silencing her questions and sending her back to the kitchen. But instead, we are left with a hint that it’s all in her head, which sells short the very real legalistic and high-control nature of fundamentalism.
Jerusalem Demsas and Maibritt Hinkel wrote an excellent takedown of this at The Argument:
“In a few short pages, Burke undermines her novel’s fundamental purpose. Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks; they are promoting a new social conservatism compatible with just enough female empowerment to allow them to pursue commercial success but not enough to cast off their central purpose as submissive wives and mothers. But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?”
Ultimately, Burke’s not-so-carefully crafted narrative falls apart—not because of an unreliable narrator, but because of a story that doesn’t know what it’s saying. Having Natalie end up clinically insane, drugged out of her mind in a freezing farmhouse may seem like her just deserts, but this ending crosses from Angry Women territory– mean-spirited glee at a well-deserved comeuppance—into a shoddy deus ex machina riddled with ableism.
“The novel wants us to be proud of her mother and Abigail for breaking free from the toxic mindset they were in while Natalie never does,” Hillary Moyer wrote to me in a text she has permitted me to share, “but if Natalie’s literally insane then expecting her to have an epiphany and do the actual work is actually impossible.”4
To make Natalie crazy is to remove her from agency in the world she built and then demolished. “This lets tradwife influencers off the hook, almost,” two more of my friends noted. “As if white supremacy and eugenics could be fixed with meds.” It would be painting with too broad a brush to conclude that Burke is trying to say all tradwives are clinically insane or on pills. Clearly, Burke knows that this ideology stretches much farther than a single woman whose mind has snapped. The people who are propelling the tradwife movement to a world where Doug Wilson dictates national policy (I wish that were an exaggeration) are unfortunately mostly sane. They know what they are doing. And they don’t intend to stop.
If everything in the world of influencer content were truly a lie, known to be a lie by the people advocating it, then it shouldn’t worry us. If every Ballerina Farm is really a Yesteryear, then it doesn’t affect society at large. But we know—and Burke knows—that the woman baking sourdough and gently crooning a canned script about sinking into the slow moments of this little life (and making sure you have lots of babies to preserve the white race!), while millions of people watch and envy, is wielding an outsize influence.
As I finished Yesteryear— read in great gulps over a very short span of time (and then re-read, to make sense of it all) —I was left both gobsmacked and dissatisfied. The longer I thought about it, the less I liked it. And yet it had gripped me so deeply, because Burke is a talented writer. As the initial, highly favorable reviews came in, I began to think that maybe I was missing something. But as I spoke with friends with a similar background to mine, who also clocked the conspicuous lack of any religious conviction in Natalie’s world, I was grateful to see I was not the only one who had been disappointed. Though most of us had read it quickly, unable to put it down, the appeal faded the longer we sat with it. Like the Instagram life it mocked, the story is an infinite scroll you cannot look away from, but when you stop to actually consider what you’ve just absorbed, you realize there was nothing there.
So many of us feel let down by this novel because we thought we were getting something stunning. Burke is clearly a skilled writer. Natalie as a character had potential. And yet Yesteryear doesn’t have a single pillar of faith— or fantasy—to stand on.
“Every reader will have an experience with the novel that has nothing to do with me,” Burke told Kirkus Reviews. But in a Note published to this very platform, she complained about “how she is being treated culturally” in the wake of the novel’s release, hinting at doing a “very meta podcast episode” about the experience.
“Yes please!” one of her fans urged in the replies. “Research not needed. Just rant!”
I can see why the deep dives that some readers are giving to the novel might feel foreign to Burke. But if she had given her admittedly intriguing concept the level of attention that her critics are giving the novel; if a close reading of Natalie’s motivations, or lack thereof, had been applied to the early drafts, perhaps this and many other readers’ experience would have been a kinder one.
Also? You simply cannot convince me that a breastfeeding mother, who researches everything, would hear about a sick cow and inquire, “What’s mastitis?”
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This was one of the first eyebrow-raisers for me. You’re telling me that a young woman who went to public school in Idaho somehow got a full ride to Harvard with no further explanation of how that happened? And her conservative mother just… sent her there? And asked her what Jewish girls smell like? Come on.
None. There are a lot of conservative Christian arguments against birth control, and this isn’t one of them.
Largely unseen child abuse, too. Though many of the choices Natalie and Caleb make in pseudo-1855 could easily be categorized as neglect, the exact reasons for why she received a hefty prison sentence (with no lenience for her own victimization in the process) are never touched on. Idaho has historically dealt with great controversy over the definition of child neglect, and it seems unlikely that living on a ranch with no running water would fit that much-debated criteria.
Honestly, there are so many more critiques I could add here, but they spin off too far from the main point. I’ll add them in the comments, perhaps.