Yesteryear has created a stir and kicked off controversies in the USA which is to be expected during the age of raw milk and MAGA.
Natalie was brought up as a good Christian by her mother, and is determined to stay on that path. She’s an oddity at Harvard University, and her roommate in particular is her antithesis. Harvard fails to impress her, because it isn’t the intellectual oasis she imagined it would be: “Rather, I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed...”. She meets Caleb at a Christian group meeting, and they embark on a clean Christian courtship. Besides being good looking and cowboyish, Caleb, unlike her, is from a privileged background, and his father is a popular conservative senator.
They marry and eventually decide to set up a ranch with a farm, all funded by Caleb’s wealthy father, of course. Natalie plays the role of a tradwife and posts on social media in a bid to promote her lifestyle and become an influencer. She does manage to get followers, but the numbers go through the roof only when a member of one of Caleb’s manosphere chat groups praises their farm in a popular daily talk show: “—this is the kind of woman who is going to get our country back on track. None of that city-woman, equality-of-the-sexes bullshit. No. This is a wholesome, traditional Aryan wife.”
As the numbers grow, so does Natalie’s ambition, despite all the trolling from those whom Caleb calls “the angry women”. She advertises for a producer, and 19-year-old Shannon enters their lives. Natalie feels uneasy about Shannon, she’s aware that Shannon sees through her and notices more dystopia than utopia in her lifestyle, like the modcons hidden behind the traditional homey look, two nannies to homeschool and take care of Natalie’s growing brood, the way she treats Caleb, etc. This is perhaps the beginning of the end of Natalie as all manner of shocking secrets and repressed urges float to the surface.
Suddenly we find her living in the 1800s, a glorious time in the stories her mother had told her in her childhood, but downright miserable in Natalie’s experience. This is the dullest part of the book, and although it serves a purpose, it takes the momentum out of all the thrilling twists and turns. You actually yawn and perhaps disinterestedly wonder if Natalie will get her make-believe utopian lifestyle back or not.
Yesteryear has created a stir and kicked off controversies in the USA which is to be expected during the age of raw milk and MAGA. You may enjoy this story, or it may make you react like an “angry woman”.
Yesteryear
By Caro Claire Burke
HarperCollins
pp. 391; Rs 599/-
