Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke’s debut puts a tradwife influencer on a ranch and asks how long the fantasy holds. The reference points are close to the surface, Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith among them, close enough that the audiobook uses a voice actor who sounds like the latter. Most of the session went on one question: does the book actually work as a critique of the tradwife lifestyle, or does it reproduce enough of the appeal to be read either way?

The structure divided us. Two plotlines, one of them the father’s, and whether that second thread earns its place or mainly exists to supply the link to present-day American conservatism. Religion was the other sticking point. The novel amalgamates denominations in ways that are not strictly accurate, which a Religion News piece we read treats as the point rather than a flaw: Natalie and the family she marries into “are defined not by Christian faith but by the politics of Christian nationalism”. We also argued about the ending, and about whether the flatness of the writing is deliberate, a book built to provoke discussion rather than to be admired.

Natalie held the room. Unlikeable, unreliable, in the middle of a mental health crisis nobody around her will name, carrying a sexual guilt the book traces straight back to Catholicism. Burke has described her as a foot soldier for the patriarchy, and as an ambitious woman inside a worldview that has no room for ambition, which is what breaks her. Caleb, filtered through Natalie’s view of him, comes off as a simpleton with no real motivation of his own. Neither of them fits the gender norms the ranch exists to enforce.

Burke’s own podcast episode about the book made several of us revise upward how intentional all of it is. She wrote Yesteryear quickly, after more than a decade of trying to get published, with TikTok as the immediate prompt. She also raised the problem of fiction by young women always being read as semi-autobiographical, and made an argument for separating the art from the artist that not everyone in the room accepted, at least not while the artist is still being paid. The session was scheduled around the August solar eclipse, so eclipse glasses were on the list of things to bring.

We mostly enjoyed the pace and the reading experience. It felt more like a fast-food read than a book that goes to any real depth, which makes sense given a marketing strategy built on having it lying in every bookstore in every airport and train station, and which doubles with its success on TikTok. That success is not only the BookTok bubble: from what we observed, it also reaches people who do not usually read much. We would recommend it to someone trying to get back into reading who needs a book with enough happening to hold their attention. Popculturally we also enjoyed the debate it is feeding about tradwife-ism, and how well the book works in a landscape where influencers labelled that way, sometimes by others rather than by themselves, are now publicly distancing themselves from an image they profited from immensely over the past years.

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