Why Yesteryear Didn't Work For Me

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I should really just stop reading the hot summer book of the year. Now, a warning before I start this. This is going to be a negative review in which I talk honestly about my feelings about this book, which are not entirely positive. If you did like this book, I am happy for you and I am glad that you enjoyed it. Um, but I'm not going to like water down my feelings. Yesterday year is the ITG girl book this year. It has been absolutely everywhere. This has happened to me before. A book has come out. um it has been fairly hyped and I've thought that book's probably not for me and then more and more people are talking about it and I see it everywhere and suddenly I'm intrigued and I decide I'm just too nosy and I must be part of this conversation and I read the book and I don't like it and Yes was not an exception to this rule. If you have been living under some sort of bookish rock, Yes, a Year by Carol Cla Burke is a novel that follows Natalie, a tradife influencer who lives on a farm with her husband and five kids and is pregnant with her sixth and it's told in flashbacks and flashforwards over the course of three timelines. Her present, in which an incident with her producer Shannon threatens to derail her perfectly planned life, her past and her sheltered Christian upbringing and what led her to the place where she is now.

[00:01:16]and her future or really the past past where she appears to have traveled back to the 1850s um and is determined to find out what has gone wrong. And I thought this was kind of an intriguing um premise. The triedwife stuff I feel like is kind of overdone online. Um but fervor is something I'm always interested in.

[00:01:35]Religious fervor and people obsessed with things. Um I'm always down to read that and I thought that the time travel plot point was intriguing. Um, so I wanted to see how she went about do how she went about doing this. And as you can guess from that synopsis, it explores ideas of social media and things like the aestheticization of rural life and the actual work it takes to do those roles. The idea of us of people loving to watch a train wreck, rubbernecking online, and also the sort of morality of having children in your online world. And this leads of course onto ideas of motherhood and um whether women are actually helped through motherhood, the sort of drive to become mothers and then left on your own to deal with it. And also this idea that Burke talks about a lot on her podcast um Despicable Lies where she talks about um being womaned. This idea of being a woman on the internet and suddenly everyone turning against you whether for deserved reasons or not. Uh the women always getting the blame. um and the being hated in a way that is not possible unless you are a woman. And also it is about hypocrisy in all areas of society. Both the people who are participating in this trades and um kind of the overarching idea of what women might do if their intelligence and ambition is constrained by the life in which they find themselves. So all of these are interesting themes. Some of them are a little overdone. I don't tend to enjoy an internet novel. I feel like it is very hard to write about the internet in a way that feels convincing and interesting and saying something new. I think because it's so much what people talk about all the time, anything you're going to say about it has probably been said a lot of times. And so getting nuance and depth into that category can be tricky. But as I already said, religious fervor, obsession, and a sort of deep look at a culture, subculture is something I'm interested in. So that part of it did intrigue me. But reading this book, there were a few things that really just didn't work for me. And one of them to begin with was the writing.

[00:03:42]Um, part of this is just like personal taste. Like there is a bit where she says, um, I sit there and watch with an outrage that froths and bubbles in all the ways that my sourdough starter now refuses to. Which to me is just cringey.

[00:03:54]That's just really awkward writing and I don't like it. Um, but I can see how someone might like that. Um, I also see how she's writing as someone who is an influencer and has been an influencer for a very long time. And so she's using influencer language, but I do wonder how much of it is that is because Burke herself is an influencer and so that is language that is easy for her to use.

[00:04:15]Um, it's not actually stepping that far away from her comfort zone. But in other ways, it just felt like there was a lot of repetition and a lot of very similar language over and over again. And again, you could argue that this is because of the spiraling of our central character and because of the formulaic nature of writing for social media. Um, but that makes it unfun to read. There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. Inevitable means cannot be avoided. Um, or didn't know what to do, how to act, what to say. Online, offline. Neither version of myself was prepared for this moment. My head felt dizzy, out of control, like a spinning top all of the time. There were three descriptors for things, three similes, three metaphors, three just describing words over and over and over again. This sort of listing, this repetitive listing. And the reason that I think that this is not great writing rather than purposeful on the attempt of Burke in this book is because it is something that I have noticed in a lot of other books. there is this cadence that seems to be very popular in more popular more um commercial fiction to do this rhythm.

[00:05:24]It's similar in like Emily Henry and things like that. there is this three things you've always there always has to be three and I understand that it is a pleasant rhythm but when you do it all of the time if you want that rhythm and repetitiveness to feel like part part of this book part of this um like controlled rigid character part of this u formulaic nature of the writing you need to push it even further you need to go weirder you need to strip language and and write in a way that is uncomfortable to read but this just feels like a formula and it is bland and hard to read uh for me. It it just gets really dull. And then aside from this, there were just other things that made me feel like it needed editing. The ending of this book, again, as I said, no spoilers, but the ending of this book, a lot of parts felt very convenient. Um, it felt like the the there were overarching idea of how it was going to end was decided neatly laid out through the plot, but there were certain plot points where there could have been a plot hole and it was kind of explained away in one single line. And this kind of brings me to the reason I decided to write this uh review because I don't normally do individualized book reviews on this channel. Um, but it was watching uh according to Alina's video about novels are written like we're stupid now. And she talks in that about how a lot of writers seem to be writing with an awareness of the audience, with an awareness of the criticisms that may come from people who are reading the book. And I feel like that's what the ending of this felt like. It felt like there were things she hadn't quite thought about and instead of leaving a pothole, she just chucked in a random line. And then similarly, there was one scene in which a character is se shown to be smoking and other characters are like, "Think of the children." And she's like, "Our children are really far away.

[00:07:06]They can't see us. it doesn't really matter. Um, and then in the next scene, that same character drinks a glass of wine and another character says to her, "But you're pregnant." And there has been no scene where the characters find out that she's pregnant. So, they must have already knew when she known when she was smoking, but no one mentioned the pregnancy when she was smoking. And this kind of I know that things get missed, but having found out after I read the book that this book was already optioned to be a film before the writer had finished reading it, that it was written in four months and that it was um and that the author in the acknowledgements thanks Anne Hatheraway for helping her develop the character because it's Anne Hathaway who has optioned it for a book makes me feel like that is why there is some sloppiness in this book. it has not had the time paid to it. And whilst that example is a small thing, um the thing that really annoyed me and the thing that most made me dislike this book was that it seemed to lack research. It seemed to lack an understanding and that made it for me lack depth. This may be just personal to me because I love books as I've said about fervor and obsession about the specificity of religious obsession. And I think that that is really important for religious characters. the the centrality to this Christian trwith who has been brought up in a very small community, a very small Christian community and had a very closed childhood. The specificity of the type of Christianity that she um enacts the the denomination which she is a part of would be very important to this character. Even if she is just playing it off like she is just doing the performance, she is just hypocritical with it, it would still be super important to her the specifics because that is the way that people in these small communities niggle at one another is with this this legalism. Particularly evangelical culture, legalism is super important. And our character never goes to church during this whole book. Never talks to a religious person like a a religious leader in this book. She crosses herself and calls someone a priest, but also does full immersion adult baptism. Baptists think that the pope is the antichrist. Not all of them, but you know, evangelical Baptists think that the pope is the antichrist. Um, sort of millennial um, rapture baptists.

[00:09:24]They think the pope is the antichrist, and you've got a woman who is a Baptist Catholic without any clarity about what her actual religion is. And it made it feel like yes, Natalie is supposed to be a hypocrite. She is talking about living a Christian life and then is not actually doing anything Christian. But you know that all these fundamentalists online go to church. They do. It's part of the It's part of what they are selling. It's part of the importance of this is the building of community around church. And Natalie is a very isolated person which again doesn't seem to go along with the character that she is. I understand we're talking about issues of mental health and with Natalie herself being a strange person, but when you are in a small community, everybody the it's the opposite of being isolated and being lonely. Um you may even if you are really unhappy and you want to get out of this religion, everybody is watching you constantly and everybody knows one another and knows intimate details about one another's life. And that would have been so much more interesting because it would have aligned so well with the ideas of social media. But it feels like Burke doesn't know anything about fundamentalist religion. People who are doing that who are submitting to their husbands, they have who who believe this idea or who want to sell this idea. She see she grew up with this idea. But she's just strictly mercenary in this.

[00:10:43]And I don't think that that is the way people are hypocritical. The way people are hypocritical is with exclaim uh prof professing these beliefs and then doing things that are different from them.

[00:10:53]Just being entirely mercenary and self-aware of it in their own head and pretending. Um it reads a lot like this character was written by someone from the outside being snarky about fundamentalists rather than someone who has taken the time to engage with and understand fundamentalists. It doesn't feel like Burke has sympathy for Natalie except in the ways that she is making Natalie profess her own political opinions. She doesn't have sympathy for people who are fundamentalist Christians. She doesn't have sympathy for people for whom this is a deeply rooted firmly held belief. Empathy for them even. I mean, you don't have to agree with them or like them. You can think their thoughts are dangerous. But if you want to write from the perspective of one, you have to empathize with them. And that's not what this book does. I've also I've been reading some reviews of this and I've seen some people critique the motherhood aspect of this as well. To a certain extent, there are hints left in this book about reasons why Natalie's connection to her daughters and uh or her children altogether and the idea of motherhood is the way that it is portrayed. Done in a way that again felt a little convenient for the plots, but I can kind of understand where that was coming from. Similarly, people have critiqued the flat characters outside of Natalie. Um, but again, I think that is something that I can understand because we are seeing from the perspective of Natalie, who appears to be some sort of sociopath and doesn't understand other people at all. So, I can forgive the lack of characterization or depth given to the other characters. Um, it allows us space to kind of understand what Natalie is perhaps missing about them.

[00:12:23]Um, but I cannot forgive the caricature of the main character because if we are in her head, she should be a bit more complex than that. And as I said, what I found also alienating from this was the simplistic political messaging. It felt like it felt very didactic and very straightforward and simple, to the point, giving giving you the words um putting her words, putting her political opinions into the voice of this character who is supposed to be so unlike her. And um someone in a review said, "If you reverse the political angle, I wouldn't be very interested in reading a book by a conservative about a fictional girl boss with a miserable life with depression whose children hate her and who judges nice religious women who try to help her out." The author might say it's a comment on the intersection of the character's mental illness with grind culture, but it's obviously meant to resonate with a broader phenomenon. And I think that that is does a very good job of illustrating what Burke has missed here.

[00:13:19]The book seems to be saying that it is about the way that this world c this fundamentalist Christian world uh limits what women are capable of and pushes them to unhealthy places because of that. Um and that it uh controls and um suppresses them in a way that bursts out later in life and that they pretend purport to be people who are submitting to their husbands and just homemakers but really they're the ones running these major businesses. um is the character was such a caricature and because the politics she was expressing was so didactic and so over the top, it lost any power. A voice in my head echoing softly, "America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman." But can you be any more obvious?

[00:14:04]If you wanted to be a Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them.

[00:14:10]That is something that someone who was not part of this culture would say about the culture. Natalie, a fundamentalist Christian, would say it in a way that felt like she believed it. She would say that there there was a reason. She would talk about prosperity gospel, for example. Perhaps she wouldn't be so much the voice for a viewpoint that is so diametrically opposed to her own. And there are two ways that I think see that this character could have been done in a way that this characterization would make sense. if she had been like a convert to it, an influencer who failed in normal influencing and decided to get into the trad life or if when she went to college she was intrigued by and drawn to the characters there and then but then felt repulsed by because of the limits of from which she had been placed on her externally and was like fighting with herself and instead of deconstructing ended up going down this route. But that's not what happens. She hates all the women she meets at university. She has a very black and white thinking. she instantly marries um Caleb and drops out of university. And so there isn't time for her to develop new thoughts or to change the perspective of the way that she grew up.

[00:15:13]And even the way she grew up, the religion is so vague. There is no specifics about how she grew up that that lead us to think that she would think this way. It is just, oh, Christians, this is what they're like.

[00:15:23]There's nothing specific to it. And I think that that makes it lack a lot of punch. And as I said, as I mentioned earlier, there was according to Alina's video, novels are written like we're stupid now. and she talks about Anna Cornbla's a book about the new immediacy. Um I had written this down wrong. Anna Cornbla's book is called immediiacy or the style of too late capitalism. I haven't read that book.

[00:15:44]So, this is like third hand. But she talks about how um novels now uh explicitly state every single meaning behind every single act. Um and using first place first person narrative for relatable ra to be relatable rather than challenging and are written in a heavy-handed and flattened in an internal present moment. And whilst we're a lot of people are not relating to Natalie, a lot of people are talking about how unlikable she is. the things that she talks about still feel like the way that she talks about politics or the way she talks about her position still feel like it is written to be relatable for a liberal online millennial or Gen Z woman. So the first person narrative is still giving us that sense of relatability through its heavy-handed politics and it is written in this immediacy style. It is written prioritizing speed, flow and direct expression as an Anna Cornbla says uh rather than metaphor or complexity. Ina talks about how um this is because of could this be because of a new age of med media illiteracy although as she states in her video Narali Sappel talks about what came first bad media literacy or very literal obvious media. Um and that article I did read and it's quite good. You uh I will leave it linked below. Now, Alina's video does also mention a lack of morally gray characters, and I would say I do have to praise Burke for that. All of the characters in this book, their motives and their um opinions are unclear because we are so limited in our perspective. And um there are a lot of morally great characters, although there is also a caricature big bad um evil rich Republican politician. He's a bit of a caricature, but the rest of them there there is there are questions about Natalie and Caleb and Shannon about their perspective and their agency.

[00:17:27]Although Alina does talk about bad characters all getting punished and this book the concept is literally traded to the 19th century as punishment. I don't know if I quite go the whole hog, but she's definitely trying some more complexity with those characters because, as I said, I've read reviews of this book and some of the critiques are that the characters aren't likable and that this ending isn't satisfactory, that certain characters don't get a comeuppance they deserve or um some people have said, why would why would some of these characters have a reason to lie? And they have a reason to lie.

[00:17:59]Everybody has a reason to lie. So, I think that's kind of proving Alina's point that re reviewers either seem to misunderstand books or are outraged when they don't get their own moral opinions reflected back to them. People read for relatability and comfort, a main character to identify with and a moment of catharsis. So, they so they get frustrated by subversion. This is what Alina is talking about. I think that Yesterday is trying to go beyond that literalism in terms of characters and in terms of plot, but it cannot get away from spoon feeding us its politics and its opinions. Everything is so bleakly laid out. And I think that we could talk about the sarcasm in it. We could talk about the um messages that Natalie is saying and how um Burke may be showing the opposite of that, but I still think it's really obviously done. I don't think that that is a a getting away from what I am saying because we know which characters like we know that Natalie is not a sound character of someone to agree with that the book makes that very clear and so when Natalie is saying things she's saying things either that we agree with but that also she can say or she is saying things that we violently disagree with and we know that that's the point um but everything is so blandly and boldly stated there is not nuance I remember hearing her talk the I remember hearing Burke talk about how this book would be uncomfortable because it would critique trades, but it would also critique people on uh the left or liberal side of the aisle. And I don't think it really did do anything that critical. It critiqued the way people interact on social media and it critiqued trades. Both things which are very easily critiqued online. Like it's not like people are out here being like, "Well, the way I act on social media is perfectly sane and normal." Everybody is like critiquing the way people act on social media and the pylons that people do. Everybody is critiquing that and it critiques a it critiques a university student for being too strident and too certain of their own ideas. Is that not how everyone talks about university students? Don't think it's doing anything groundbreaking. As Selena says, declaring the int aesthetic and political intent of a novel makes the storytelling a lot more dull. Whatever political commentary is in the work loses its power when you tell instead of showing. So, whilst I applaud Burke's attempt to write against the grain in terms of not giving us a satisfactory ending or the correct moral vision, I wish she'd pushed this further, allowing us to understand Natalie's characters in more subtle ways, having her live her hypocrisy rather than being purely mercenary and incredibly self-aware.

[00:20:27]From in from interviews, it sounded like she was going to show Natalie being right about the mainstream world in ways that would be uncomfortable for the reader. But instead, it felt like it was pandering to a liberal worldview. and I use the word liberal very specifically.

[00:20:40]Um, its politics were simplistic, even if its characters were a touch more complex. Let me know your thoughts on Yesterday in the comments down below. If you if you did love it, I'm sure you disagree with me. Many of the reviews said that they whiz through the book in 2 or 3 days. Um, but if I I think if you can whiz through a 400page book, I mean, in part that long just because it repeats itself so often, whiz through a book that that that's that long, it's probably not that deep. But I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. If you're new here, my name is Roshene. I put out new videos every other week. So, I will see you again very soon. Bye-bye.