Yesteryear

Yesteryear hit all our shelves with a brilliant and sensational premise we all wanted to dig into: Natalie, a “tradwife” instagram influencer who fakes a picture perfect farm family lifestyle out in Idaho, for social media, gets sent back in time to 1855 American pioneer life, where she has to actually endure the tradwife life she sold to her audience. It’s whole set up is meant to make you think, “Well, now the tables have turned!”

So with a killer hook, we should expect a great story. However, the novel skims the surface on Natalie’s career as an influencer. We get a few glimpses, but we don’t really get immersed in it. How did she run her millions of follower empire? What was it like tending to a family, and being an influencer. We get some hints, but not enough to make us feel the weight of what she was going through. In fact, we’re so distracted as readers with her father in law, her husband, political theater, and some other relationships of hers.

The book attempts at playing with a time structure by splitting the story in to three parts: “The Past”, “The Present”, “The Future”. This framework is very misleading because the structure is a trick in itself. By intentionally misleading the reader, the structure does more harm than good in telling the story we were hoping to experience. You get the past in the present, the present in the future, the future-past in the past, and some sort of a future present? Trying to explain it makes my head spin. The author attempts to use this fractured construct to mirror the psychological unraveling Natalie goes through in the novel, but it ultimately falls short and doesn’t pay off well. That non-linear timeline tossed into a linear structure is supposed to keep you guessing of Natalie’s true reality, but ultimately robs the story of the narrative weight.

There are some good concepts in this book that aren’t fully explored, which is a recurring critique that I have. For instance, Natalie navigating getting consent to film her kids. At some point one of her daughters asks not to be filmed, and it surprises her. Like other events or dynamics in the book, this event is barely explored, it’s just a token throw in that gets called back to once more later in the book. Superficial and nothing of deep value for us to explore.

As much as I was interested in the premise, in the end the book fell short of my expectations. I think there’s awesome opportunity for someone to tell a story that likely many readers were expecting.

Killer hook, lazy execution.