Was anyone else disappointed by Yesteryear?

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day to seemingly find herself living on the actual frontier in the 1800s, was one of my most anticipated reads of the year – I find the tradwife culture and the nexus of influencer/culture warrior to be fascinating. A lot of the themes covered in the book I did really enjoy reading about – the aestheticisation of rural life that does not match lived realities, the 'trainwreck' element of the attention economy, the ethics of how influencers present their children on social media, etc.

However, it really felt to me like this was a book written to prove a point rather than to allow concepts and characters to breathe. I felt like the author didn't really make much of an effort to understand the internality of conservative women raised in a fundamentalist religion: instead, she made a caricature based on her observations of tradwife snark reddits. This just leads to an over-the-top account of how pathetic the main character's life truly is: to the point of her husband not being able to maintain an erection around her, a choice I felt to be deeply unnecessary.It's ironic that Natalie, the protagonist, constantly loses herself in spirals of imagining the miserable lives that women who prioritise careers over family hold, when this book really feels like the author was doing this to tradwife influencers.

The idea that women who choose to live in a more conservative way either repent, like the mother or sister, or become mentally ill, like Natalie and her mother-in-lawfeels like a liberal circlejerk – and I say this as a progressive raised in a conservative, traditional culture. There is very little exploration of why these cultures are attractive today – largely due to the sense of community that they impart. But, because Natalie is written to be such an alienating figure with no friends at any point in her life – she literally says this! – and Caleb is written to be a loser shunted to the side by his family and brothers as part of the author's attempt to render her life unenviable, this key aspect is unexplored.

Because of this narrow focus, the other characters in the book are conveniently written to fill purposes rather than feeling like actual people and sometimes are outright contradictory. This is especially the case with the mother, whose reveal about the protagonist's father – where the betrayal of depriving her children of a father who wanted to be in their lives is never addressed! – and honestly doesn't really track with the way she raised her daughters. Shannon's character also is underexplored and frankly also let off the hook for the way she exposed footage of the children's abuse on national television without their consent.

The ending doesn't give any details about what happened to any other characters, making it clear that they really are unimportant. What happened with Samuel and Stetson, whose involvement in the whole 1800s setup is unclear – how much are they involved? What are their thoughts on this whole scenario? The daughters, Jessa and Junebug, are referred to as not doing well but we never get details. Did Caleb ever get charged?

The resolution to the twist felt underwhelming; not much was actually done with the '1800s' plotline which ended up feeling more like a marketing hook than a well-integrated part of the story. There were also some ridiculous plot holes, like I'm pretty sure that CPS doesn't just give a family member a warrant to take kids without any officials (or even law enforcement) present.

I think if the book had gone in more of a direction that explored the complicity of the public – including critics and snarkers who can't seem to look away – it would have felt far more nuanced. A good example of this is Penance, by Eliza Clark, which critically explored a lot of the public fascination with true crime. Instead, by making Natalie crazy and guilty of assault, it makes her fantasies about the 'angry women' just seem psychotic rather than genuinely exploring why this content makes people tick to the degree it does.

I'm okay with character-study driven books, as well as theme-driven books, but given the shallow characterisation and the un-nuanced treatment of themes, this didn't work for me on either level.