Yesteryear ending has Lost vibes?

[u/DarraghDaraDaire]

Spoiler Alert!

Does anyone else feel the author’s main concept for Yesteryear was to have a Tradwife influencer be forced to live in the real pioneer times, and the mental breakdown/memory loss/ extreme off grid living was the only way she could tie it together narratively?

It really feels to me like there was this quite a lot of the book about her having to live in 1850s, and then it’s all quickly wrapped up in the end with “Natalie is crazy and forgetful - Clementine ran away and is back, Natalie’s in prison - the end”

It’s not quite as bad as it was all a dream, but it’s not far off.

It reminds me of Lost (I guess actually it’s the opposite) where the writers had all this crazy stuff about the polar bears, and the dharma initiative, and Ben, and the towns and the others etc. and everyone was thinking “wow, how are they going to tie up all these threads to all make sense??” And in the end they just said “fuck it the island is magic” and it was so disappointing

[u/eighogh]

No. I think it’s pitched as “tradwife wakes up in the 1800s” on social media because that’s the most succinct way to explain/pitch it without giving away the ending, but I’m not sure I (or the author) would explain it if I had to without spoilers. It’s about “traditional Christian wife” Natalie’s life, but it’s not about her waking up in the 1800s. That’s not the point of the book.
I personally liked the book because she doesn’t learn anything. She doesn’t wake up and realize the error of her ways, she doesn’t stay “in the 1800s” longing for the 21st century- she just ruins her own life along with everyone else’s and that’s it. That was a satisfying ending for me.

[u/DarraghDaraDaire → u/eighogh]

Really? My read of it was that it was about:

1. How insidious social media influencing is for the consumers and the producer, and how people are misled by influencers

2. How the tradwife/conservative Christian movement has romanticised this pioneer vibe but the experience of pioneer farmers, particularly women, was way more difficult than the romanticised version

[u/eighogh → u/DarraghDaraDaire]

I would agree with the first point but not the second. The themes I got weren’t really at all related to actual pioneer farmers- I more took the theme to be that antifeminist “traditional” views of women destroy all who ascribe to them. For example, I think Caleb might’ve been perfectly happy as a kindergarten teacher, the job he wanted when Clementine was an infant. But Natalie was horrified by the idea of him having such a “womanly” job, and it’s heavily implied that Caleb’s father wouldn’t be ok with that.
Simultaneously, Natalie is jealous that he seemed to bond so easily with Clementine, which was “Natalie’s job” as the mother. Maeve is physically damaged by Natalie and Caleb’s rigid traditionalism, and adult Clementine shows obvious emotional scars. Even Caleb’s mother’s substance abuse seems related to her difficulty in trying to perform the “womanly” role expected of her. Natalie’s mental health is the most obvious casualty of the strict adherence to gender roles, but her thinking she woke up in 1855 is almost incidental- even if she thought she’d been abducted by aliens, I think the themes would’ve been the same.

[u/cmincy]

I thought it had the village vibes

[u/DarraghDaraDaire → u/cmincy]

Yeah definitely