Archive
Book Review: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is an attempted satirical takedown of tradwife influencer culture that ultimately reflects a shallow understanding of fundamentalist Christianity and collapses under the weight of its third act.
This review contains major spoilers and discusses themes of religious fundamentalism, mental illness, and queerness.
Summary:
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
Review:
What it does well
I love the set-up of this book. A tradwife influencer wakes up in the 1800s she was pretending to want to live back in and has to face the stark reality of that. Told in the tradwife “present,” flashbacks to her life before her influencer status, and flash forwards to her 1800s time travel. I was hooked. I needed to know how the time travel happened. The set-up reminded me of Kindred by Octavia Butler only with a hateable main character.
A note on my perspective:
I was raised a closeted bisexual cis girl in a fundamentalist Evangelical family. I, in modern terms, deconstructed and have become a progressive queer Christian adult. Nattie’s culture is the one I was raised in and am deeply familiar with. I was literally a rurally raised homeschooled girl who wasn’t allowed to wear pants. The author gets a lot wrong.
Religious inaccuracy and cultural flattening:
It is deeply unclear precisely what religion Nattie is. This should be clear, as a twisting of a specific faith into something for the far-right to weaponize is at the core of tradwife influencer culture. She goes to church every Sunday growing up with her mother and sister. She and her young, rich husband share a religion. But she only ever says “Christian.” If we are to assume that it is a fundamentalist version of US American Christianity, then it could broadly be Evangelical, traditional Catholic, or Latter-Day Saint. And that’s not even getting picky about denomination (Non-denominational? Baptist?). Here’s what we do know. She goes to church, not temple, so probably not LDS, even though she’s very clearly inspired by Ballerina Farm who is LDS. She gets full-immersion baptized as a teenager, so not Catholic. However, the book says a PRIEST baptizes her. The only denominations that refer to their leaders as priests do not perform full-immersion baptism. It’s a factual error that made me cringe. A lot.
Later in the book, Nattie crosses herself. She also has a hallucination that is clearly based on confession. Both of these are only done, again, by denominations with priests (Anglicans, Catholics). But she does none of the other things those denominations might do like observe a liturgical calendar or acknowledge saints. Despite this confusion, Nattie is portrayed as truly devout. We see inside her head. She prays a lot. She desires to be close to God. Yet, she never studies her Bible. She never brings her children to church, in spite of going every Sunday herself growing up. And church isn’t replaced by home church with her husband.
Another issue is AFTER she deconstructs, Nattie’s mother tells her she’s simply never been nice enough. The demand to “keep sweet” is a very common demand made of evangelical girls and women. We saw it in the Duggar family, and I lived it myself. Girls and women are supposed to be nice all the time. It makes no sense to me that her deconstructed mother’s main argument against her tradwife influencer daughter is she isn’t nice enough. A deconstructed person would be much more likely to say, “you’re lashing out because you’ve been asked to be something you’re not for so long. I want to know who you really are.” Not “why can’t you be nice?!”
All of these details point to an author writing from outside this culture who did not do the work required to understand it, resulting in a shallow, flattened portrayal of fundamentalist Christianity that borrows its aesthetics without engaging its lived realities. It’s this weird mash-up of things tradwife influencers mention without any understanding that tradwives come from different denominations with different ways of doing things and different belief systems.
Queer representation:
As a queer person myself, I’m deeply bothered by the way Nattie’s assault on her employee, Shannon, is presented. First of all, her first person account seems to be that she attempted to strangle her. But later Shannon says she sexually assaulted her. Which is the truth? The end of the book takes Shannon’s statement as face value. Nattie assaulted her because she’s a closeted lesbian. Nattie never admits to this, but she doesn’t deny it either. Does she think this is less bad than attempting to strangle her? Given her entire family’s response (and my own lived experience of fundamentalist opinions of queer people), it seems unlikely. If it is the case that we’re supposed to read this as Nattie has always been a closeted lesbian, then this is horrible representation. Not that LGBTQ folks can’t ever be the villain, but closeted people don’t automatically abuse their children and assault their employees.
Mental health representation:
Then there is the mental health representation. It is clear that Nattie first starts to fall apart after the birth of her first child when she develops very clear post-partum depression that a nurse expresses concern over and wants to get her help for but her mother intervenes and says she just needs to start running again. Her post-partum depression never gets better, she doesn’t actually enjoy mothering, but she keeps having children both because it’s what God wants and because it’s what her father-in-law demands in exchange for funding their hobby farm.
Ok, so here we get to the full mess. The big twist is that Nattie hasn’t time traveled to the 1800s. She hasn’t been kidnapped. After the big PR disaster of Shannon revealing the assault, her husband tells her that his father wants her to be killed. She suggests instead that what her husband really has always wanted is just to be left alone and they can do that. They can cut themselves off from the world and live like it’s the 1800s. They do just that, with the older children running away, and they are left with just the toddler and the children born after her. She thinks it’s literally the 1800s when she wakes up one day because she has periodic psychotic breaks. She thinks she might be being filmed for a reality tv show because, again, she’s lost her mind.
When her oldest daughter finally shows up years later with a court order for the children (there is no way on earth that would have taken that long, but that’s another tangent for another day), she expresses some sympathy for her mother but the court system prosecutes her and puts her in prison for 30 years for child abuse. Of course she did abuse her children but she is also very clearly very mentally unwell, and many other people boosted up this scheme of hers (her husband, other family that brought food to the edge of the property for the husband to pick up, the husband was escaping to a cabin with electricity and tv every day to watch football while she was actually living like the 1800s). The novel wants to have it both ways: to explain her behavior through mental illness while denying her any meaningful context, care, or accountability framework.
Final verdict:
I saw another review that said this book feels like it was written by one of the “Angry Women” Nattie talks about. The liberal women who are angry at her for existing. You can have a problem with far right culture and tradwife influencers and write a book about it. But you also need to actually understand the culture and not stomp on people with mental illnesses and necessarily closeted LGBTQ folks in the process.
Ultimately, while the satire of influencer culture is sharp, the novel’s handling of fundamentalism, queerness, and mental illness is reductive and stigmatizing. Additionally. its explanation for how Natalie ends up “in the 1800s” is far less imaginative and less effective than a true speculative or magical realist turn would have been.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, using one of my referral or coupon codes, signing up for my free microfiction monthly newsletter, or tuning into my podcast. Thank you for your support!
2 out of 5 stars
Length: 400 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro
Alejandra, deep in the throes of postpartum depression, starts to see the specter of the Mexican folk demon La Llorona.
Summary:
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.
Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.
When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.
Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.
But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
Review:
The concept for this book is super original. A family with a genetic predisposition to postpartum depression is also haunted by an interdimensional being who takes advantage of that among the first-born daughters. It tackles both intergenerational trauma (especially of the colonized) and postpartum depression through a speculative lens. This speculative horror book also shows the main character going on a healing journey.
I particularly appreciated that the postpartum depression wasn’t a mere symptom of the haunting. Alejandra has postpartum depression. The being essentially targets the negative things Alejandra’s brain is already telling her. An example from the very beginning of the book is Alejandra is crying in the shower because she is so sad, and the being shows up and starts suggesting her family would be better off without her. An idea Alejandra has probably already had, but now she’s hearing it from this being that she thinks only she can see. This strategy becomes clearer when we see the flashbacks to Alejandra’s ancestors. The being also sometimes takes advantage of physical ailments but it primarily targets mental ones. I appreciated how this meant the story still took the reality of postpartum depression seriously while also tackling the issue of the multi-generational haunting. The story is told both in the present and through extended flashback chapters to previous generations.
The main character is Chicana married to a white man. In the flashbacks to the previous generations we see the racism her grandmother endured in the 1950s, and we also learn some about Mexican history (both recent and in immediate colonization by the Spanish) through two ancestors further back. The main character is bisexual, and there is a significantly important trans side character in a historic time period flashback. I particularly appreciated seeing a trans person represented in a historical time period.
The writing was at times a little clunky, especially towards the end. It just felt like I was reading a book, as opposed to getting lost in it, and it felt like different characters sounded the same. Again, this wasn’t throughout the book but limited to occasional scenes especially toward the end of the book. I also found it an odd choice to inform the reader the present-day was 2020 and then never acknowledge any of the 2020 issues. (For example, expected the mother with postpartum depression to end up dealing with distance learning for her two school-age children. But nothing ever came up.) Everything else could have stayed the same and been in 2019, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t 2019. I also felt that the husband character was treated in a two-dimensional way, as was the marriage. Marriage is very complex and yet complexity was only allowed to the postpartum depression and not the marriage. While I enjoyed this read, I did prefer the author’s previous book, The Queen of the Cicadas / La Reina de las Chicarras (review). One reason that is also evident in the title, was that book had more Spanish in it, which let me practice my Spanish more.
Overall this is a really unique read that explores postpartum depression and intergenerational trauma through a speculative lens. It’s a plot that will keep you guessing and intrigued.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, using one of my referral/coupon codes, or signing up for my free microfiction monthly newsletter. Thank you for your support!
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 272 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Safe In My Arms by Sara Shepard
Summary:
Three women whose children attend an elite preschool in coastal California find their lives intertwined when they all receive threatening notes in their children’s backpacks.
Review:
Sara Shepard is most famous for writing Pretty Little Liars, the series the hit tv show is based upon. In Pretty Little Liars the threat is text messages. Here it’s old school notes. Only this time, it’s the moms twisted into secrets and lies.
The three moms are at the center of the book, and I only actually liked one. Andrea is a trans woman who moved to California to be able to transition and live openly, away from her elite and judgmental family. Now, I will note I am a cis woman, and I would like to hear what a trans woman thinks of the representation, but I thought Andrea was written very well. I appreciated the realism of having to deal with some transphobia in her family but also being warmly welcomed by the other two women – both as a friend and as a woman. The author’s note at the end makes it clear she sought out a sensitivity reader for Andrea, and I could tell. If only the same efforts had been made for the other two women….
Lauren is struggling with postpartum rage (a symptom tied to postpartum depression). I just felt she was quite two-dimensional, and I just couldn’t bring myself to care about her.
Ronnie is a topless maid, formerly a stripper, who moved here from Pennsylvania with her daughter. It at first appears she did so to get away from an abusive man. I can’t talk about Ronnie without revealing a slight spoiler (it’s revealed about 1/3 of the way into the book), so be warned.
Ronnie’s “daughter” is actually her niece. Her sister was in a relationship with an abusive man and was addicted to something. It’s vaguely explained as drugs. Ronnie, after a violent fight with her sister’s significant other that ends with her discovering her sister wounded on the floor, takes the baby and runs with her. She never follows up to see if her sister is ok. No, no, she just steals her daughter, changes her daughter’s name, and decides her daughter is better off with her anyway. I just simply could not empathize with the child abductor here. Ronnie had other options to help her niece. She had never even tried anything else (beyond living with her sister to “protect” her). I’m ok with a book featuring a less than ideal character. I’m not ok with the whole tone of the book being that I should empathize with her or that what she did was a mistake.
Because that’s the thing. The book kind of wraps up with the message that all moms make mistakes and it’s ok to not be perfect. I mean, sure, within reason. But there’s it’s ok to not be perfect and then there’s you’re only in the mom club because you stole someone else’s child.
Also as someone who cares about addiction and recovery, I found the depiction of Ronnie’s sister Vanessa to be heartless. She isn’t given the same chance and possibility to recover and change and learn from her mistakes as the other mom’s. In fact, the whole “moms don’t have to be perfect” scene features the moms describing all the reasons their children make them drink alcohol. The hypocrisy of this scene sickened me.
Contemporary books are approaching the pandemic in a variety of ways. This one chose to set the story “post-pandemic.” I’m fine with that optimistic choice, and I understand why it was made. But the strange thing is it mostly seems to acknowledge the impacts of the pandemic as purely economic – there’s a lot of talk about economic challenges from when we all stayed home but almost zero mention of anything else. I think there was one mention of face masks? This is set in California. There was way more impact than just economic. It rubbed me the wrong way how it made it out to be all about economic issues, and also how things just immediately snapped back to normal. If one wants a normal contemporary book, fine, just don’t acknowledge the pandemic at all then. Include an author’s note that this is for escapism and move on. Don’t acknowledge it as an economic downturn like 2008 and nothing much else…..
Beyond this, the actual main issue going on at the school was interesting and twisty. I had my suspicions early on, but I still enjoyed the twists. What really saved the book for me, though, was Andrea. We need more positive trans rep in psychological thrillers, and Andrea was very well-done.
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 304 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
Support my work with a tip or browse my shop for curated book club guides, how to guides, cross-stitch patterns, and more!
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 