What is Yesteryear?
It’s the knockout debut novel by Caro Claire Burke – the book of the summer, and quite possibly the year. The title is both the name of the farm where the main character, Natalie, lives, and an allusion to times of yore when men were men and slapped their wives, and women stayed home, had babies, cooked, cleaned and repeated.
Who is Caro Claire Burke?
She’s an American writer living in Virginia, and you can bet her bank account is a whole lot bigger than it was before she sold Yesteryear. She’s also the co-host of a bitingly good podcast on politics and culture, Diabolical Lies.
Why is everyone talking about Yesteryear?
The premises is genius. Natalie is a social media influencer who earns megabucks from her millions of followers, and who posts about her many children, her “sweet little organic farm” in Idaho, her baking, and her cowboy husband – she’s a true tradwife. What her followers don’t see is the infrastructure holding the fantasy together – the nannies, the farm workers, the state-of-the-art kitchen, the crop pesticides, the producer who edits the videos. Then one day Natalie wakes up in the year 1855, minus all the help, modern gadgets, internet, her cashmere sweaters, and her millions of followers. How did she get there, how will she cope, and how does she get back to her other life?
What’s a tradwife?
It’s a fairly recently coined term for women who choose to live their lives on organic farms, have multiple babies, wear long dresses, home-school their children, and make all meals from scratch. Hannah Neeleman, Utah mother to nine, and herself an influencer under the name Ballerina Farm, is perhaps the best-known example, with 20 million social media followers.
RM Block
Why does the actor Anne Hathaway get thanked in the book’s acknowledgments?
When Yesteryear was still in draft mode, Burke’s agents went sniffing out movie options. Anne Hathaway loved the idea so much that she bought the rights, and will star in and produce the movie. She actually even had some input into “bringing Natalie to life” according to the acknowledgments, as Burke worked on the novel.
I’ve heard there is some kind of twist at the end?
Yes, Burke weaves in a stunning twist. Did I see it coming? I did not – but maybe you’re smarter than me. Where was my jaw when I had finished reading this book? Firmly embedded in the ground. Ever since I removed it, I haven’t stopped talking about Yesteryear.
