Yesteryear is as domestic horror disguised as homesteading satire. Burke establishes almost immediately that Natalie is unreliable - she references a Whole Foods that may not have existed in her supposed era (there's only one WF in Idaho, est in 2012 in Boise) and describes a 500-acre property with the reverence of someone who probably has no idea how long a mile is (500 acres is less than 1 mi by 1 mi squre). These aren't authorial oversights. They're tells.
But the real horror is Caleb's systematic drugging of his wife. Over 15 years, he and his son (and possibly his parents) keep Natalie in a pharmaceutical haze whether it's Valium or horse tranquilizers is hard to say. The first valium were supplied by his mother Amelia, who spends her own days drinking Chardonnay and disappearing into chemical dependency. Natalie's memory gaps, her inability to recognize her own children, her confusion about what's real: these are the direct consequences of chemical control. By the final section, Natalie can't distinguish between actual events and delusion, and we genuinely don't know if that final interview with her college roommate happened or was another drug-induced hallucination.
This is genuinely dark stuff. But here's where the book loses me: Burke sets up Amelia's parallel decline as a smoking gun: the mother-in-law visibly wasting away, cognitively compromised, on the exact same substances that Natalie consumes. This detail appears and disappears. The author never returns to it. We never see Amelia's story, never explore what it means that an entire family operates on the principle of chemical control of women. Shannon tells Natalie directly: "In order for me to be a homewrecker, you would have to have a home for me to wreck, and you don't. You don't even have a family. What you have is a business." That line is devastating: it delivers the realization that Caleb's entire family conspired to build and maintain a fantasy that kept Natalie compliant and isolated. And then the book largely abandons this realization.
The children are parentified to catastrophic degrees. Mary, at 15, slaps her mother across the face and lectures her on behavior while complicit in drugging her. Clementine initially leaves at age 16 with all but one of her younger siblings, and returns 15 years later to rescue the rest of them. She says in response to learning her mother is "constantly moving in and out of a pharmaceutical haze": "Perfect. That's just perfect." By the book's end, we learn Mary has written her own story and works at Whole Foods, which feels like authorial commentary, but it's never clarified. Maybe it's paid advertisement or a wink at influencer endorsement.
Burke's satire of influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric has real bite. But the cost of that satire is steep: the characters are abused to the point of becoming cautionary tales rather than people. Natalie could have been a story about a woman who realizes she's trapped by a man and a family invested in her delusion and chooses to leave, or chooses to stay, or discovers the trap was never real. Instead, we're left in ambiguity that feels less like literary technique and more like the author chose psychological torment over resolution.
The unreliability works as a narrative device. But by the end, you're not reading about Natalie's survival. You're reading about a woman so thoroughly broken that you're not sure what's real anymore and the book never quite earns that level of darkness because we come in late in the game. Does Natalie simply deserve this fate because she's unkind? How ironic.
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