Yesteryear was one of my most anticipated reads of 2026 so it’s such a bummer that it fell apart for me. I think this book had the opportunity to be a really interesting commentary on the Trad Wife movement and on White Christian womanhood, but it took a turn that felt frankly kind of lazy.
Natalie Heller Mills is a very successful trad wife influencer. She lives on a farm with her husband and six children, and every day people log on to watch her bake healthy meals from scratch, dress her children in matching beige linen clothes, and collect eggs from her “Ladies” (the chickens).
This image is a lie, though. Natalie has nannies, farm hands, and a producer who never show up on screen. Her kids are not perfect; in fact her oldest daughter is refusing to participate in her posts. Her husband is unfaithful. Natalie is determined that none of this becomes public.
Then one day Natalie wakes up in the 1800s. Her husband is older and more grizzled. She has two children she doesn’t recognize and might be pregnant with a third. She’s on an isolated farm with no water or electricity.
The book goes back and forth between Before Natalie (the influencer) and After Natalie (waking up on the 1800s farm). We see how she becomes an influencer, which honestly was the better, more compelling part of the book.
Natalie was raised by a single mother (her dad abandoned the family) who was religious and her idea of success is really tied to White Christian womanhood. She went to college to find a husband, married a man with similar values who comes from a wealthy family, and immediately dropped out of school to have and raise children. The reality of her life is very different than what she imagined, though.
Natalie’s husband is not motivated to be successful and essentially refuses to work (this is possible due to family money), but even though they are financially secure this is not a choice Natalie considers acceptable. Due to the way she understands gender roles, her husband needs to be a provider for her to have the “perfect” life she feels compelled to live.
This is where the book is interesting.
- Natalie has no real power to create a successful life because her religious faith tells her she can only act as a support system to her husband, and if he refuses or is unable to meet her expectations she cannot act directly as it would be outside the sphere of her gender role.
- Natalie eventually figures out a way to achieve that success by monetizing her acting out her “traditional” gender role on social media, but it’s a lie, in part because it’s not sustainable (she needs outside help) and in part because her husband and oldest child really have zero interest in participating.
When Natalie wakes up in the past, she has no audience to perform for and so then the question becomes, “Without that audience seeing her perfection, is it worth sustaining it?” She doesn’t just want a traditional rural, Christian life where she submits to her husband; she needs someone else to observe it and validate her in order for it to be “authentic” in her mind.
The problem is the book promptly drops this exploration and it feels like a cop out. I can’t explain without spoiling the rest of the book, so please continue with the understanding that I’m revealing a lot here.
Seriously, spoilers from this point on. There’s no turning back.
“After” Natalie is actually just ten to fifteen years in the future. She’s been canceled online, which leads her to having some kind of psychotic break where she has amnesia. Her husband is still her husband, her two children are her two youngest, and they’ve gone completely off grid. When her husband leaves to “farm” everyday he’s really going to hang out with their oldest son who lives nearby. This son also provides the food she thinks her husband is harvesting. I felt like this book could have done a lot more with the idea of needing an audience to perform aspirational living in order for it to be valid, and instead it was like “Natalie was manipulative, too fragile to handle cancellation, and then got amnesia.” Like, what? It felt like the author spent all this time setting Natalie up as a compelling character and got bored with her. I’m also not sure about what the message is supposed to be because it sure felt like, “Natalie is a bad person and we’re not supposed to like her so I punished her by giving her amnesia and making her live in the shitty past without antibiotics and running water.”
It’s very much a book about how the women who carry water for the patriarchy are the first to be discarded by it, but the main character was so flat and unlikable that I didn’t care at all what happened to her. I was more interested in the deconstruction of her influencer identity and how it was embedded within her understanding of White Christian womanhood.
It’s a bummer that the set up for the book was so good and then it fell apart. It’s actually more of a bummer than if the book was just meh to begin with.
Yesteryear had so much potential and was such a let down I just can’t recommend it.
