Review: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
I’ve just closed this book and I can’t decide whether to open it right back up at the start, or to throw it across the room, and that is in fact a huge compliment. I was both totally engrossed AND I had no idea where it was going.
I don’t read lots of books in this genre (what genre even is it?) but the Yesteryear blurb had me hooked and the early reviews by people whose taste I trust were, as they say, rave. I even paid for a hardback and I hardly ever do that.
Right, so, the set up: Natalie is the living embodiment of America’s tradwife. A gaggle of beautiful children, a serene home, adorable chickens, sourdough made daily from a well-fed starter; all streamed near-constantly to an audience of millions. She and her doting husband Caleb live on Yesteryear Ranch which is most definitely legally nothing remotely resembling Ballerina Farm.
But one day Natalie wakes up to a life which is almost hers but not quite, in all the worst ways. Day by day she has to work out how to live in this nightmare shadow-house with a family that are not quite the people she knows them to be. Who is she, how and why is she here, and more importantly - how can she get back to the life she knows is truly hers?
I’m not quite sure which strand to tug on first. Perhaps the hard-faced examination of what it means to be a woman in society - how you’ll never quite meet everyone’s (anyone’s) expectations, not least your own. (“America hates women. What a comfort to remember.”) How powerful men will manipulate and use others to get their own way. How women can be the worst critics of anyone living differently to them.
Or I could focus on the excoriating, ridiculous charade that social media can be, especially when following ‘influencers’. How editing and selectivity and envy drives clicks and monetisation.
“What I, what we, offered them, was the next-best thing: little moments of vicarious living. Brief bursts of imagining.”
Or the evil parallel path of exploitation of children in the pursuit of content. The impossibility of their informed consent, or the troubles stored up for the future for many children exposed via large accounts.
OR I could bend your ear for some time on the familial relationships that Burke strips bare in this book. The parents and siblings and ‘the help’, the spouses who treat each other with disdain but slap a practiced smile over the top.
The ending is wild, and it’s this that’s going to send me back to reading the whole book again to see what I missed the first time (a lot). The whole book is a RIDE. But mostly it’s clever and insightful and avoids easy answers all the way along the line. No absolute virtue nor vice here. Yesteryear makes you really work for your answers, but I promise it’s worth it.