Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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 heir to a political dynasty? 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 ruthless 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.

Why I Picked It Up

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

Why wouldn't I? The buzziest book of the year, the prism capturing most of our zeitgeist and conversation.

It's a book I knew mostly of ahead of time, meaning that I did have pre-formed notions about how I felt about certain aspects of the plot and its development. I don't think that makes my reading unfair, but it does make it lopsided in that I was doubtful of the execution based on fragments and pieces I'd seen. I wasn't itching to read it, once I found out how everything would unfold, but I did want to be able to comment on it, so I wanted to finish it.

The marketing push obviously worked here. With its timely hook, cultural celebrity author, and adaptation buzz, Yesteryear has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and sparked infinite conversation, and Caro Claire Burke has gotten the publicity push of a lifetime. The positioning of this book is brilliant, and its attention deserved as a conversation-starter.

I could write three reviews of Yesteryear: the execution and experience, the creative choices, and then some of the unpacking of the position it occupies within the cultural ecosystem. I hope that what I've landed on isn't too all over the place.

About the Book

Yesteryear is a buy-in book, meaning that a lot of whether certain elements work for you or not will depend on how intentional you believe the author to have been in composing all its details. I sort of land on a bit of both; there are aspects of the book's construction I'm willing to bet are purposefully engineered by Caro Claire Burke as meta commentary—and she's clearly highly accomplished and intelligent—but that doesn't excuse every possible flaw.

(Then, of course, are you looking to pick at Yesteryear—to examine it in the context of its cultural commentary—or do you just want a good time? Mileage will vary, again. It's a perfect high-low book in that way, which is different from being solely upmarket.)

Then there's some of the execution, or what I perceived to be plot flaws, that I'm guessing was just messy: the natural trade-offs of a hugely ambitious book that attempts to do a lot at once.

I did enjoy it more than I expected to, although I did have plenty to pick at! I agree with scathing critiques I've read as well as glowing, heaping praise. Which makes Yesteryear an interesting case—a bit of a mood ring, this one.

Voice & Tone

First, I have to say—the first hundred pages or so are rougher than the rest. There's a lot that frustrated me at the beginning about the style that faded away as the narrative settled into a rhythm. The beginning is very harsh, and (in my opinion) choppy, with a lot of sentences cutting into other thoughts.

It's clear from the get-go that residing in Natalie's head is a very hateful place to be. It sounds like one of those descriptions you can't give yourself, but I'm a very kind and rosy person. For the most part, I look at people and see the good (and/or try to.) So the angry, bitter, warped way Natalie looks at people is just an unpleasant way to spend a few hours. I didn't enjoy being in the head of the character, and that does impact how much I like the book. Unlikeable characters per se aren't going to do that to me, but hateful characters are specific, and that's separate from my feelings about characterization, plot, prose, etc.

I registered pretty quickly that the voice itself isn't for me, which wasn't about Natalie being unlikeable so much as pacing choices and the flow of the delivery of information. Yesteryear is such a strong, cinematic hook (already in adaptation) that I did want the writing to match its promised level of immersion. It's okay that it didn't; the construction is simply not to my taste. I never felt in-the-moment with Natalie, and you could argue that's a product of the distance and disassociation (an argument people also make for Madeline Miller's Circe, which I didn't like) but it still impacts my connection to the writing.

There weren't really moments in the prose that surprised me and I personally didn't love the small interjections of interviews or commentary about the children. None of it felt natural, which you could argue makes a statement in itself. It felt like telling or like a constant fourth-wall break, which just isn't a style I enjoy. (Of course, you could also say—perhaps generously—that the book attempts to shape a constant sense of performance.) As a parallel example, I loved the bit of the "gnat" in Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs but didn't love the equivalent version: product placement in Yesteryear. Some lines were also very obvious or heavy-handed, although sometimes surprisingly funny.

Pacing

In terms of pacing, it's somewhat fascinating. We almost can't evaluate Yesteryear in the regular demands for fiction because Caro Claire Burke had such an unusual debut experience. She got 30+ pages of setting up normal—day in the life, in influencer terms—vibes before we reach the hook. I'm not bothered by a delayed inciting incident, but I do think it's a long time to get acclimated to the voice without relief.

It is also a lot of flashbacks to Harvard, and a slow build of how her life constructed. Originally when it was pitched and publicized, I thought it would be a time-travel narrative or a thriller. I don't necessarily think it's either.

The awkward choppiness does "make sense" in the end based on how it all wraps up, but that doesn't smooth down the reading experience in the way that I'm looking for; it's still a quality of the book worth evaluating for me and my taste.

I thought I wouldn't love the ending, but I thought the slow build of suffocation—combined with Natalie's flashes of inspiration or clarity—were actually fantastic.

The Satire Problem

I have strong thoughts on satire and what makes satire effective, and feel about Yesteryear like I do about Yellowface by R.F. Kuang: that it is essentially immune from criticism. There are methods of angling a so-called satire that essentially insulate a book from being disliked for its execution.

For every person noting a subjective quality of Yesteryear that didn't land for them, there's another piping in to say "You just don't know how to read unlikeable characters!!!" The reaction boils down to whether you think Caro Claire Burke (/insert author here) specifically engineered each part of the book to some universal effect, even its weaknesses. Thus is the infallibility of a big swing. I kind of hate that, as a reviewer, but respect the rarity of how a shield like that develops around a given book: a particular combination of some tricky factors that build that chemistry.

Was continuity a structural problem where things slipped through the cracks, or a method of characterization? Was fact-checking a problem here to the extent they changed setting details between the ARC and the final copy? Should you read into external posts and claims by the author to decode the content of the book, or "let the book stand for itself"? There's no real right answer, but the book is now essentially buffered because people will say you just didn't get it, regardless of whether or not it's "true" satire.

Books like these can be propellers of conversation, which is an aspect of reading I enjoy almost as much as the books themselves:

The Tornado of the "Unlikeable Female Character"

Natalie—our narrator—has essentially made herself so miserable in pursuit of traditional good ol' American ideals that she sees no way out, and so forcibly doubles down.

My personal favorite way to write an anti-hero—as done by Suzanne Collins in The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes—is to write "rock and a hard place" characterization in which every decision chips away a little more at morality. Natalie's characterization is more so a constant attempt to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, the bullet wound being her initial, stubborn insistence on the tradewife image. In some ways, I appreciate that she is constantly doing her best, even though reasonable readers will register that her energy is being funneled towards the "wrong" values.

There are one or two tipping points at which she realizes that she's well and truly fucked up the trajectory of her life, but she's too prideful to be able to backpedal. You do feel sorry for her, even though she's done it to herself.

“Sleep, breastfeed. Breastfeed, sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Breastfeed. Cry. Breastfeed. Sleep. Kill yourself. No—sorry. Sleep. ”

Political & Cultural Commentary

I do agree with broad critiques that Yesteryear can feel one-dimensional in this sense—it punches down a lot. Natalie is interesting, but I don't feel her character is dynamic enough for the messages it's trying to convey—but, of course, the conversation sparked by this book pretty much covers that, so does it really matter if it's on-page?

I had certain moments where I perceived it to be the author speaking rather than the character, which may or may not be a fair assumption; those pokes contributed to my agreement that there was some punching down that perhaps diluted the effectiveness of Yesteryear as satire, and instead could make it feel oddly nasty or personal at times.

Prime example: without a strongly articulated religion,I didn't think the lines about God or etc. were all that interesting to me. Plenty of people have argued that the vagueness and inconsistency of her spirituality are purposeful, or unimportant, but I actually don't feel that holds enough weight. I do think a stronger sense of cohesion or internal logic here would have gone a long way in alleviating some of the problems I ultimately had with Yesteryear.

Luckily, Natalie spends a solid amount of the book in survival mode, splitting over her own dissonance, so it's easy enough to ignore. While you can argue the aestheticization of religion was intentional, I thought the way it was layered in was ultimately cheap rather than simply surface level, so I almost wish Burke had steered clear altogether if she wasn't going to engage with it more, because she is a deeply smart person and I've thought many of her online takes have been great. Some of the book's shining moments are when it talks very frankly about political engines and similar.

“[Working in politics is] actually one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink. If you don’t think too hard, you never get rattled.”

One aspect I loved that Caro Claire Burke handled brilliantly was in displaying the slippery slope of desperate quick fixes to maintain this impossible image.

A prime example: panicked about the ineptitude of her husband, Natalie diverts his ambition of becoming a schoolteacher by throwing out an excuse about the schools indoctrinating children; Caleb then goes down the rabbit hole online and ends up being sucked into a red-pilled culture that then has incredibly negative ripple effects on the homestead. (Also, her resentment towards Caleb being essentially a man child was so awful, real, and smart. And the part where she realizes she has no ownership over the lease and is digging herself further in.)

The best moment of the book in terms of impact and horror and commentary was probably the first time Natalie realizes that she's married the wrong man and that—due to both her values and her pride—she is forcefully stuck in a life she doesn't want forever. Very, very well done, in my opinion.

“This was the moment the crisis became clear to me. This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog. ”

Also, she probably nailed the psychology of how you start thinking in terms of an audience, even if it's in a dissociative way to get through daily life i.e. Natalie's invisible "Angry Women" mechanism. The presence of a camera or the social media element was almost just a vehicle; that split would have happened regardless, but of course intensified. I do agree with some critiques I read too, however, that the book ultimately falters in how it fails to attach Natalie's action to broader cultural mechanisms in that it places nearly all blame on her as an individual, so I would have loved more engagement there. Does it land as satire without that? Is it too easy to hate her because Burke detaches Natalie from all possible social factors and just makes her terrible? She nails some of the reasons we like influencers who frustrate us, which I liked after recently reading the nonfiction version of this via Fortesa Latifi's Like, Follow, Subscribe.

“These women wanted—no, they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.”

“The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.”

Let Me Be Picky for Just a Second—the Book Club Bit

This book is a fantastic book club pick, whether or not you enjoy it. For that reason, I'd say it deserves the sales? Love it or hate it, people want to talk about it and do. It's fun to be part of a behemoth moment like this in which everyone is analyzing the same moments and scenes and lines.

It's a timely, massive book, and I fully understand after reading why everyone has something to say about it. The premise and the execution and the subjectivity of everything baked into it make it conversation-worthy, even if not all that conversation is good. I'm not sure I really loved reading it, but I liked getting to dissect it with friends.

• I don't think Caro Claire Burke knew what to do with Natalie's mother, and the family element here felt weirdly inconsistent to me here. Her mother seemed to be whatever she needed for the plot in any given scene even when her actions were wildly contradictory and slippery.
• Quotes by the author in interviews have made me somewhat skeptical about the intentionality of some moments I thought were messy and not constructed—but then again, a book does become an entity greater than oneself so c'est la vie.
• I thought the most brilliant part of the book was when the family is watching Shannon's interview and someone tells Natalie to stop, and you realize she was saying all of her most hateful internal narration thoughts out loud without her registering. Damn!
• I don't like the book's engagement with "real person fanfiction" i.e. Ballerina Farm, and think teasing Yesteryear as related is actually pretty morally suss (in Gen Z terms.) Regardless of your personal feelings towards Hannah Neelemann, I think marketing any association is deeply unfair, especially understanding the current lack of media literacy re: what's real vs. fiction, which this book should know because a big theme of it is performance!!
• I was a liiiittle frustrated that the book didn't have any consideration of a speculative element. I truly thought before its release that Yesteryear would be more of an Outlander situation, and while I understand Natalie's consideration of various possibilities, the marketing did have me expecting some engagement with the idea of time travel versus not really touching on it at all. I was expecting, if anything, it to take a tack similar to Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly in which you could make a case either way. I felt a bit cheated as a reader that it wasn't even acknowledged.

Overall Thoughts

“Do you honestly think there are no consequences to performance?”

There were some really stunning (i.e. startling) moments in Yesteryear, which makes it a fun one to book club. Regardless of where you land on how it ends—and I feel absolutely awful about having accidentally spoiled it for one of my literary agents over lunch—you'll definitely say "Oh my God" at least twice.

I agree with plenty of glowing reviews, and I also agree with some of the very scathing takedowns or notes debunking the research behind it. I give credit for Caro Claire Burke for attempting to do a lot but simultaneously wish she had tried to do more because a good bit felt surface level. I thought it did a great job dealing with the impossibility of determining the nature vs. nurture of how some of these dynamics develop—how one choice leads to another leads to another.

As a reading experience: I never fully loved the voice and prose—entirely separate from me liking the character or agreeing with the plot direction—but was much more invested in it than I expected to be, which was a win. I don't think it's a masterpiece, nor do I think it's worthless. It's a conversation-starter at the very least, and how much you love it will depend on what you value within your books (which is always true, but for this one more than most.)

PS. I do love the cover, the title, and the electrifying hook.

Sorry for the visibility here. Surprisingly difficult to find a crisp sample!