Yesteryear

The first thing Yesteryear does is put a camera in a kitchen and make the kitchen feel more dangerous than the farm outside it.

Natalie Heller Mills wakes before dawn, thanks God for her husband, her children, her pregnancy and her follower count, then starts the day’s content production. There are nannies, a producer, farmhands, a cow, a chicken coop, a hidden microwave and enough money to make the whole thing possible. Online, Natalie presents this as the natural result of discipline and Christian virtue. In private, she thinks of her children as units in a brand, her husband as a project, her employees as defective equipment and her followers as small animals that need to be fed.

That opening is funny. It is also immediately unpleasant, which is the point. Natalie’s voice is precise, nasty and frequently very funny in the way that watching someone confidently explain their own hypocrisy can be funny. She knows exactly how to arrange a kitchen so it looks lived-in without looking untidy. She knows where the camera should go. She knows how to turn domestic labour into a moral performance. She also knows, somewhere beneath the religious language and the forced smiles, that the performance is failing.

The book gets into the ending, obviously. This is not the sort of novel where protecting the twist improves the discussion.

The central device is that Natalie wakes up in a nineteenth-century version of her own ranch. The house has the same layout, but there is no electricity, no modern plumbing, no phone and no hidden appliances. Her husband is an older, harder version of Caleb. The children are not quite her children, although they look enough like them to make the distinction worse. Mary, Maeve, Noah and Abel live in a stripped-back homestead where women cook, clean, sew, wash clothes and accept that men make the important decisions. Natalie is slapped, injured in a trap and forced to live the life she has spent years selling to other people as freedom.

This is a strong premise because it does not merely punish Natalie with inconvenience. It removes the infrastructure that allowed her to pretend that she wanted the past. She wants the aesthetic of nineteenth-century life, with the labour performed by someone else and the camera placed at the flattering angle. She wants sourdough without having to understand fermentation, farm animals without learning how to keep them alive, and a large family without admitting that children are not decorative evidence of virtue. Once she loses the nannies, the electric lights, the shopping trips and the ability to outsource the ugly work, the brand becomes much easier to assess.

The novel is especially good on the difference between work and the performance of work. Natalie spends years building Yesteryear Ranch into a successful social media account. She pays for a marketing course, learns how to stage authenticity, hires Shannon to make the footage look better, and turns her exhaustion into content. Her followers do not want the actual farm. They want a controlled image of the farm. They want to believe that a woman can bake, homeschool, raise six children, run a business and look attractive without needing help. Natalie understands this, then uses it to make money. The lie is not accidental. It is the product.

The sharpest parts of the book are the ones where Natalie understands the machinery because she is part of it. She knows that her audience wants perfection and occasional failure, but only the right kind of failure. A little flour on the counter is authentic. Forgetting to feed the children until nine at night is not. She knows that the goal is not to be liked or hated but to be both at once, because resentment and admiration produce engagement. It is a sharp observation, and the book keeps finding concrete ways to put it under pressure.

The problem is that Yesteryear is not satisfied with trusting its own premise. Natalie is already a compellingly awful person. She lies about the help she employs, exploits her children’s images, manipulates Caleb, hides money from him, humiliates women she considers inferior and treats the people around her as props in a system that is both commercial and religious. The book does not need to keep proving that she is awful, but it keeps doing so. Nearly every chapter adds another grotesque thought, another cruel joke, another piece of evidence that Natalie has mistaken control for competence.

Some of this repetition is deliberate. Natalie’s mind is a loop. She uses the same phrases until they become threats: pregnancy brain, the Angry Women, the days of yesteryear, being watched, being a good wife. The repetition shows how a person can turn a slogan into a cage. It also means the novel sometimes feels like it is running the same test again after the result is already clear. Natalie sees hypocrisy, explains it, then commits a more extreme version of it. The point lands. Then it lands again.

The historical sections are more interesting than the modern ones, partly because the constraints are finally physical. Natalie can no longer change the caption or move the camera to fix a mistake. She has to wash clothes in freezing water, scrub with lye, bake bread, tend an injured animal and deal with the consequences of not knowing what she is doing. Her first attempt at bread fails, and this is treated as a genuine crisis because it is one of the few moments when the image of competence cannot be edited around the result. She is also frightened by the children’s dependence on her, even while she has spent years insisting that motherhood is her natural purpose.

The best relationship in the book is between Natalie and Mary. Mary is initially presented as one of the children in the old-fashioned household, but the later reveal shows that she is Natalie’s own sixth child, raised in the invented past after Natalie and Caleb decided to turn their family into a long-running experiment. The children are taught that they live in the nineteenth century. They are cut off from the outside world, supplied with food by older brothers who secretly use a truck and a cabin, and made to believe that modern life is dangerous and morally corrupt.

This reveal is horrible in the specific way that good horror is horrible. The supernatural or psychological mechanism matters less than the fact that Natalie has used a child’s adaptability against her. Mary does more than live in a strange house. She has been trained to make the strange house feel normal. She becomes a mother to younger siblings and an enforcer of the rules, while Natalie occasionally mistakes her competence for proof that the experiment is working. The book is strongest when it lets this arrangement sit without immediately converting it into a speech about ideology.

The ending goes further than I expected. Clementine, the first child and the one who has been watching longest, escapes with the other children. She returns years later as an adult, secures the children’s removal and confronts Natalie with the world outside. Natalie is now fifty-five, has been living in the ranch’s invented past for decades and is convinced she is pregnant, although she is menopausal. She is also intermittently drugged, legally entangled and unable to distinguish the production set from the house itself. Her daughter’s memoir, The Book of Mary, becomes the final record of what happened.

Clementine’s line about time only moving in one direction is the book’s clearest statement. Natalie has spent her life trying to reverse time, or at least package a fantasy of reversal for other people. She wants to return to an imagined world before modernity, before women had choices, before work was complicated by money and institutions and technology. But the past she wants never existed in the uncomplicated form she sells. It is assembled from money, labour, historical ignorance, hired workers, selective filming and the suffering of people she refuses to regard as full participants.

There is a good irony in Natalie finally escaping with Caleb after the children are taken away. He has been both her victim and her collaborator, an overgrown child who accepts the world she builds because it gives him permission not to choose anything. He is not secretly the mastermind, and Natalie is not the only person responsible. But the novel is careful about responsibility in a way Natalie is not. Caleb benefits from the arrangement. The boys help maintain it. Doug finances it when it suits him. The adults around the family repeatedly choose the version of events that requires the least immediate discomfort.

I did find the final television interview too neat. Reena appears as the anchor for the interview Natalie has selected, the person who once represented everything Natalie thought she had defeated. The book’s structure loops back on itself so aggressively that the ending sometimes feels assembled from thematic requirements rather than discovered through character. The memoir’s title, the producer’s questions, the prison sentence and the direct address to Natalie all work, but they also announce what they mean. There is not much room left for uncertainty.

Still, the book has earned the right to be blunt. Its real target is the conversion of private life into a product, and the way online audiences reward people for making coercion look voluntary, more than tradwife content or religious conservatism on their own. Natalie is not interesting because she is secretly good. She is interesting because she understands the lie and keeps improving it. Her tragedy is not that she wanted an impossible life. It is that she kept treating every person who objected as a technical problem.

I enjoyed Yesteryear more when it was making me uncomfortable than when it was explaining why I should be uncomfortable. The premise is strong, the voice is committed, and several scenes are difficult to forget, particularly the first encounter with the altered ranch, the failed bread, the dead chickens and Clementine’s arrival in the red Subaru. The novel is also about twice as long as it needs to be. It keeps adding proof after the verdict has already been returned.

Even so, I finished it because Natalie’s collapse remained unpredictable in its details. I wanted to know which part of the performance would fail next, and whether she would ever understand that the problem was not one bad employee, one ungrateful daughter or one hostile audience. She was the system. She was also trapped inside it.

That is what Yesteryear ultimately became for me: a novel about a woman who mistakes control of the image for control of her life, then builds a prison so convincing that she can no longer tell whether she is being watched by God, an audience, her family or herself. The answer is all of them, and none of them can give her the past back.

I finished Yesteryear, which is not the same as saying I enjoyed being inside it. This book is about Natalie Heller Mills, a wealthy Idaho homesteading influencer who presents her life as a perfect Christian return to family, faith, and the olden days. She has a husband, six children, a farm, nannies, ranch hands, a producer, millions of followers, and almost no interest in telling the truth about any of it. Then she wakes up in a stripped-down version of her own ranch, apparently in 1855, with a different husband, different children, no electricity, and no way out. That is the setup. The actual subject is what happens when a performance becomes so complete that the performer cannot find the door anymore.

There are major spoilers throughout this review, including the ending.

The opening worked for me immediately because Natalie is funny in the way a dangerous person can be funny when she thinks the room belongs to her. She wakes before her alarm, thanks God for her husband and children, thinks about fresh bone broth, and describes herself as perfect at being alive. She also has five million Instagram followers and enough help around the house to make the word homemaker feel like false advertising. The nannies homeschool the children, Producer Shannon films the content, ranch hands do the work Natalie does not want to mention, and Caleb spends his days performing a version of rural masculinity that he does not understand.

Natalie knows all of this. That is important. She edits reality on purpose, not because she is fooled by her own image. She hides the nannies because the followers want to believe she does everything herself. She stages the messy kitchen, the homemade food, the cheerful children, and the exhausted but beautiful wife. She is not selling a farm. She is selling proof that a particular life still exists, and that she has won it.

The first section is strongest when Burke keeps Natalie close to practical details. The hidden appliances. The fake casual flour spill. The homemade orange juice tutorial. The children being told they are independent while an adult keeps a hand on the cup. The expensive kitchen designed to look accidental. The distinction between what is filmed and what is happening is clear and nasty. Natalie’s whole business depends on the same principle as a staged display unit in a store: show the customer the surface that suggests use, hide the parts that make the object function.

Then the book removes the surface. Natalie wakes in the older version of Yesteryear Ranch and is immediately confronted with cold, darkness, hand-pumped domestic work, and a husband who slaps her when she resists him. The house is physically similar to the one she built, but everything modern has been taken away. There is no refrigerator hidden in the pantry, no microwave, no electric lights, no staff who can disappear behind the frame. The book’s joke is obvious but effective: Natalie wanted the look of the past while keeping every convenience of the present. Now she gets the past without the convenience.

What makes this more than a standard time-slip satire is that the olden days are not exactly the past. The house is a constructed environment, and the children are not historical children. They are Natalie’s own children, rearranged. Mary, the severe teenager who manages the household, is actually Natalie’s sixth child, born after the family began the experiment. The younger children are also her children at different ages. Caleb is a version of Caleb. The neighbors are her sons, who secretly bring in modern groceries. The entire ranch is a family project that gradually stopped being a project and became a prison.

The reveal is good, but the book does not depend on surprise. It spends enough time showing how the performance becomes real that the final explanation feels earned. Natalie and Caleb first describe the ranch as a game, a way to live out traditional values and hide from the world. They buy the clothing. They remove the modern appliances. They explain the rules to the children. They keep saying it is temporary. Then the car disappears, the children lose access to the outside world, and the adults stop agreeing about where the line was. By the time the children escape, the question is not who invented the prison. The question is who noticed it had become one.

I found Natalie repulsive, but not in a simple way. She is cruel, vain, manipulative, racist, classist, and very funny. She sees other women mainly as threats, audiences, or failed versions of herself. She calls women Angry Women while secretly creating anonymous accounts to attack them. She criticizes Vanessa for buying disposable products at Target while secretly admiring the fact that Vanessa is upset by her. She thinks Reena’s career will destroy her, then feels triumphant when Reena is laid off. She treats every human encounter as a ranking system, and she is always checking where she stands.

But Natalie is also constantly working. That does not excuse her. It does explain her. She has built a life in which every task must be completed, photographed, edited, monetized, and defended. When she is not producing content, she is producing herself. She does not know what she wants without first asking how it will look. Even her rebellion is staged. When her daughter says, “Stop filming me,” Natalie does not hear a boundary. She hears an attack on the business model.

The strongest character besides Natalie is Clementine, because she is the first person who refuses to treat the performance as reality. She is the child who understands the camera, the audience, and the cost of being made into content. Her adult return to the ranch is not a dramatic rescue in the usual sense. It is a confrontation with the mother who taught her that the outside world was dangerous and that smiling was a duty. Clementine has not escaped without damage, but she has learned that a life can be different. Her line that time only moves in one direction is the book’s simplest and most useful statement. Natalie keeps trying to return to an earlier version of herself. Clementine understands that there is no honest way to do that.

I also liked what the book does with Mary. At first she looks like the ideal pioneer daughter, disciplined and capable, making soap, baking biscuits, caring for the younger children, and correcting Natalie’s behavior. Then she becomes more clearly a child forced into the role of mother. She is a person who has been made responsible for a world she did not choose, not merely Natalie’s punishment for believing in traditional domesticity. When Mary asks whether anyone has ever lied to Natalie, the question lands because Natalie has spent her entire life treating lies as necessary household maintenance. Her mother lied about her father. Natalie lies about the farm. The children lie because they have to survive the adults.

The book is less convincing when it treats every political disagreement as equally stupid. Natalie’s views are meant to be grotesque, and many of them are. The problem is that her college classmates, her family, Caleb’s online acquaintances, the influencer course, the political crowd, and the television culture often speak in the same exaggerated register. Almost everyone is a caricature of a social position. This is deliberate, but it sometimes makes the novel feel like it is arguing with the loudest version of the internet rather than with actual people.

Caleb is the biggest example. His transformation from soft, wealthy, indecisive husband into a violent, conspiracy-minded patriarch is thematically clear. He becomes the man Natalie thinks she wants, and the result is horrible. The problem is that he is so consistently foolish that the relationship between them becomes one-sided for too long. Natalie is always assessing him, correcting him, and using him, while he mostly absorbs the pressure until he suddenly becomes dangerous. His later realization that he wanted to be left alone is plausible, and his role in the ranch’s construction is important, but I wanted more evidence of him making choices before the damage was complete.

The same applies to some of the satire. The book is very funny about raw milk, homeschooling, influencer courses, the manosphere, political branding, and the way a fake rustic life depends on modern logistics. Natalie watching Caleb discover that rats are not responsible for New York’s population problems is excellent. So is the social media course where a hundred women are told that authenticity will make them rich by the woman who charged them $1,500 to say it. But the jokes sometimes repeat after the point has already been made. We understand that the farmhouse is fake. We understand that the audience wants a fantasy. We understand that the men in the forums are building a mythology out of grievance. The book occasionally explains the mechanism again because it does not trust the first explanation to hold.

The final movement is where the novel becomes more disturbing than funny. After Shannon’s interview exposes the farm, Natalie’s public image collapses. Her followers turn on her. Her family fractures. Her mother finally asks why it is so hard for Natalie to be kind. That question is almost embarrassingly direct, which is why it works. Natalie has treated kindness as weakness, performance, or a tool for managing other people. She has confused discipline with virtue and endurance with consent.

Then Clementine arrives with a warrant and takes the children away. The scene is painful because Natalie does love Maeve, perhaps more easily than she loved the older children, but love does not cancel what she did. She created the conditions in which her children could not see the ocean, attend ordinary school, use a telephone, or know that their siblings had left. She taught them that the world was full of wolves while she and Caleb became the wolves. Her grief is real. Her innocence is not.

The framing ending, with Natalie in prison and Reena interviewing her for television, is strange in a way that I think the book wants. Natalie is being prepared for an interview in a reconstructed kitchen, still insisting that the details are wrong. She is handed Mary’s memoir, The Book of Mary, and asked to read the prologue. Mary describes the family’s escape and says that the future Natalie feared was beautiful. She also says she misses her mother. That is more painful than a cleaner ending would have been. Mary does not forgive everything. She does not need to turn Natalie into a monster to leave her. She can love her and still refuse to return.

I finished Yesteryear because I wanted to see whether Natalie would ever understand what she had done. The answer is partial, unstable, and probably permanent. She can recognize the prison after someone else points to it. She cannot reliably stop rebuilding it. That is the point, I think. The ranch was never only an ideology or a business or a marriage. It was a system for avoiding uncertainty. Natalie wanted a life where every person had a role, every problem had a cause, and every failure could be blamed on someone else. She got exactly that life, then spent years asking why it felt like a trap.

This is a sharp, unpleasant novel, and it occasionally pushes its satire too hard. Still, the central idea stayed with me: there is a difference between making a home and controlling every person inside it. One gives people somewhere to return to. The other makes leaving feel like betrayal. Natalie built the second one, called it Yesteryear, and then acted surprised when nobody could breathe.