Books & Audiobooks
What a crazy time we are in. We are living under a perpetual cloud of mis-, mal- and disinformation. Total strangers can influence how we eat, what we wear, how we maintain our health, how we should raise our children and on and on. People spend enormous amounts of money propping up the newest fads and crazes making millionaires out of the people behind the cameras and microphones. What has made us so desperate that we acclaim expert status to imposters and disclaim those whose propositions are based on fact and science?
It is under this mantle of our current social media obsession that Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear is derived. The internet has become a place where everyone has a voice and the “trad wife” phenomenon has reached epic proportions. Our protagonist Natalie Heller Mills has spent her formative years in small town Idaho, having been raised in a strictly Christian fundamentalist household and is desperate to spend her university years in the big city. After securing a scholarship to Harvard, she sets off to experience life in a way that is a mystery to her and discovers that the “new life” she so desperately yearned for is not at all what she had hoped for. She solves her existential problem by marrying another student, a young man whose extremely wealthy family is a political dynasty. It falls to her to raise her small family’s fortunes and she turns to the internet to monetize her “trad wife” skills, creating videos of her perfect life as a wife and mother living off the land on a huge ranch in rural Idaho. As her success grows, so too does her obsession to embody the perfect image of trad wife, and the societal impact of what she is “preaching” manifests in ways she had not foreseen. We watch as the tentative hold that Natalie has on reality comes crashing down and sends her life into a tailspin.
Lots of layers and themes to this story! A great read!