Yikes on bikes this book was wild.

Let’s start with the summary.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

“Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.”

Natalie is a very unlikable character, and an unreliable narrator. She is really not a nice person at all, and never has been. When she leaves home for college, her mom implores her to “Be kind”, which doesn’t seem like it is in Natalie’s wheelhouse. She must have some sort of kind though, because she did end up getting married to Caleb. Who also is not a good character. This book is really full of unlikable people, who do ugly things. Natalie though has her social media audience fooled, or at least some of them. The Angry Women have never believed she was doing all that she said she was. Everything is an act with Natalie, and in fact she starts to view herself as Online Natalie and then just her regular self, and regular old Natalie is not a peach.

I don’t want to reveal too much here, or spoil anything so I am trying to tread lightly while giving an honest review.

Natalie is a master manipulator. She has a vision and forces people to follow her whims, whether that is through her money or fame or just dumb luck. And after the birth of her first child, she really needed some help but her mom managed that situation poorly, which did not help. Her mom perpetuated the old myth that Natalie could handle her own “baby blues’, and didn’t need any professional help, and instead recommended exercise. And this book is full of things like this, old worn out ways of thinking, tempered with the megaphone that is the internet.

And everything in her life is fake, fake, fake. And then one day, she is in 1855, with a family that she doesn’t recognize as her own. She suddenly has to live the life she pretended to live, and is not loving it. Her husband is a hard man, like a man from Puritan times, not the pliable husband she is used to.

And, I don’t think I should say anything else just in case.

Would I recommend this book? No, not really. It made me terribly sad, and was very heavy and intense. I understand why some of us want to read it though, just the curiosity of it all.

I am going to do a video for my secret YouTube later on, and I will post that link here if anyone is interested. I will explain a bit more there, and also reveal the twist for anyone who wants to know without reading the book.

Feel free to email me if you want to chat about it!