I found this book disorienting and at times unbelievable, but nonetheless hard to put down.

Natalie and Abigail were raised by a single hardworking Christian mom who worked as a secretary by day and crocheted baby clothes which she sold at her church by night. Their father “had departed” when they were young, leaving mom to do her best to raise the girls with a conservative moral core. Natalie excelled in school and received a full ride to Harvard. Having never left Idaho, her mother saw her nervously off to the airport with the advice “You can reach anyone if you show them kindness.”

Natalie’s culture shock in Cambridge comes in the form of her prep-school roommate Reena who likes to party and invites boys back to their room for late night trysts. After 6 attempts to get her own room, she finally gets into a physical fight with Reena and her transfer is approved.

She predictably gravitates towards the church group at Harvard. While she is disdainful of Reena and her liberal partying friends, she holds no high regard for the church group either. “I sat with the dumb girls, I suffered their little snuffling moans and sighs of glory to God, and it was fine.”

Already I was questioning Natalie’s narrative. Dumb girls in the basement? Harvard administrative support for Natalie? But I don’t have too much time to dwell on this before the narrative plods ahead.

Her second semester she meets Caleb Mills, from a wealthy conservative family. By her second year they are married, she leaves school and becomes pregnant with her first child Charlotte. Although we are told Natalie comes from a conservative background, we also know that she went against the grain enough to leave home with a full ride to Harvard. Who is this girl?

After an unsuccessful start to her marriage, her awareness of her husband’s lack of ambition, and her growing understanding of the enormous wealth of her husband, Natalie takes things into her own hands. She finds an enormous farm in Idaho, which she is able to purchase and renovate with funds from her father-in-law Doug Mills, who gives her $5M in exchange for her promise to have more kids. She moves her growing family to the farm and she and Caleb dive into farming. After killing 4 cows they realize they need some help and start bringing in workers from the nearby Home Depot.

As they burn through the $5M from Doug Mills, and Natalie is exhausted with her life as mother and farmer, she asks her mother one day how she managed it all, and her mother confesses that she always images performing her everyday tasks for an invisible audience. This odd advice seems to resonate with Natalie, who soon finds herself dropping $1500 on an online course on being a cultural influencer. Natalie starts to produce a perfected version of her everyday tasks of motherhood, homemaking and “organic” farming for an invisible audience. Her efforts are picked up by a conservative podcast and suddenly she has 2 million followers. Advertising dollars start pouring in. She hires a producer, Shannon, to help her with content. She hires 2 nannies to help with the four children. None of these helpers – the Home Depot farm workers, the nannies, or Shannon – appear on camera.

The gap between online and offline Natalie widens. About mid-way through the first section she wakes up in another world, which we come to understand is her same farmhouse, but 150 years earlier. She is surrounded by children who look like her, and call her mama, and a husband name Caleb who is similar but older than Caleb she remembers. Natalie doesn’t know where she is and cannot connect with this family. The narrative splits between the “present” of Natalie’s growing cultural influencer world, her challenges with Caleb, her children, and Shannon the producer, and the “past” of Natalie’s being trapped in what she experiences as a fake family she does not recognize.

As these two timelines fall apart, Caleb tells Natalie he wants a divorce and is moving to California with Shannon. Natalie in a rage confronts Shannon and tries to choke her but manages to control herself and in desperation calls Doug Mills for legal advice. Shannon soon goes public with her story, laying bare the reality of Yesteryear Ranch.

I won’t spoil the surprising ending, which forces an even stronger disjunction between social media presence and the reality of Natalie’s life, and the bleak choices she has made. As noted in the New York Times “Though she’s the mastermind behind their family-cum-empire (which includes a line of cookware and preserves akin to Meghan Markle’s As Ever), she’s still at the mercy of Caleb and his cunning career-politician father, Doug Mills. She wonders ‘what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: His wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had.’ It’s a conclusion that belongs in 1855, but is all too relevant in the present: For women, the system rewards neither path.”

Yesteryear is in many ways a book of our time, and I give it 4.5👍🏼 out of 5👍🏼.