Sofia's Updates

"WARNING: This is a “brain-on” review with (hidden) spoilers, as I am mentally unable to “turn my brain off” while reading anything.

Yesteryear has one of the most compelling premises I’ve come across: a wildly successful tradwife influencer is forced to actually live the life she sells to millions. It promises satire and a biting critique of gender roles and performance. But despite that strong setup, the novel is underdeveloped, structurally uneven, and thematically hesitant, especially once the full picture comes into focus.

At the start, (view spoiler)

For a while, this works. Watching her struggle—physically, emotionally, socially—has a brutal clarity. The fantasy collapses under the weight of reality: domestic labor is exhausting, dependence is dangerous, and the patriarchal structure she once aestheticized becomes suffocating. This is the novel at its strongest, where the premise and its implications are most aligned.

But the "twist" fundamentally reshapes the narrative—and not, in my opinion, for the better.

By the end, it’s revealed that (view spoiler)

This reveal shifts the novel away from (view spoiler) What initially reads as a confrontation with ideology (i.e., “live the life you promote”) becomes a story about (view spoiler)

Instead of interrogating the tradwife phenomenon as a set of choices, incentives, and power structures, the book reframes it as something emerging from (view spoiler). And while both are contributing factors, doing the former would have actually made it the "bold and biting satire" others are claiming it to be, and opting for the latter created a trivialized, watered-down spectacle that will undoubtedly (and successfully) sell to the masses on nothing more than its concept—unfortunate, but expected and not at all surprising.

The novel sidesteps one of its most interesting and important questions: what does it mean to choose this life, to profit from it, and to promote it to others? Natalie is not simply trapped—she is also a builder and beneficiary of the system. She cultivates the brand, monetizes it, and helps reinforce the very ideals that later “trap” her. Yet the narrative doesn’t fully grapple with that complicity. Instead, it increasingly positions her as a victim: of her upbringing, her husband’s family, her audience, and her own mind.

The (view spoiler) softens the critique, transforming what could have been an examination of agency into something closer to a (view spoiler).

This is where the book’s lack of depth becomes most apparent. It raises big ideas—patriarchy, religion, influencer capitalism—but doesn’t sustain a rigorous exploration of them. The 1855 world, which could function as a material critique of gendered labor and dependence, becomes symbolic instead. And while symbolism can be powerful, in Yesteryear it feels like a retreat from the harder, more uncomfortable questions about compliancy, participation, and power.

Structurally, the novel doesn’t fully support its ambitions either. The shifting timelines and genre blending (contemporary, speculative, psychological, thriller, mystery, etc.) was disjointed and propped up the ambiguity surrounding what is “real” versus constructed; it might be intentional, but it read as messy and confusing rather than as a methodical storytelling approach. By the time the ending arrives, any and all stakes had dissipated.

It’s also worth examining how the book engages with its subject matter on a broader cultural level. Yesteryear clearly wants to critique the tradwife phenomenon, but its approach aligns with a familiar pattern associated with white neoliberal feminism: an emphasis on individual experience and suffering over systemic analysis and accountability.

The novel centers Natalie’s distress—her loss of control, her psychological fragmentation, her suffering within patriarchal constraints. But it doesn’t fully interrogate how she participates in and perpetuates those constraints, particularly as someone with social and economic power; her platform reaches millions, her content shapes norms, and her brand generates profit. These dynamics are acknowledged, but not deeply examined in terms of how her financial incentives, validation from primarily female but also male audiences, and cultural influence actively reinforce the system she's depicted to be trapped within, or how her choices contribute to normalizing and sustaining those same oppressive structures for others, especially those who can't monetize it.

As a result, the critique is flattened into something more comfortable: the tradwife as victim rather than as an active participant in a broader ideological, social, and economic system. Missing is a sustained engagement with questions like:

(1) Who benefits from these narratives, and how?
(2) What responsibility do influencers bear in promoting regressive ideals?
(3) How do race, class, gender, and privilege shape who gets to “opt into” this lifestyle?

Without this layer, the novel’s themes are tepid at best, and contrived, willful blindness and ignorance at worst. It exposes the illusion of the lifestyle, but stops short of fully dissecting the structures and actions that sustain it.

The idea of Yesteryear is undeniably intriguing, and it taps into a very current cultural conversation, but it's ultimately a book that either pulls its punches or had no punches to throw to begin with. The scope is painfully narrow, turning a potentially sharp, satirical systemic critique into a more familiar narrative of individual collapse meant for a good time but not much else.

It’s not that the book has nothing to say, it’s that it doesn’t say enough, or with enough clarity, to match the strength of its premise. For a story built on such a rich and provocative idea, the gaps are too great, too relevant, and too important for me to ignore.

Readers who enjoyed Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake and/or The Once and Future Me by Melissa Pace may have a good time with this, I suppose.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review."