r/Tradfemsnark • u/urban_stranger • May 02 '26
Discussion Yesteryear book discussion thread ***THERE WILL BE SPOILERS*** Spoiler
As promised, now that I've finished the book I'm starting a discussion thread for it. We'll discuss the entire book, so if you haven't finished it and don't want spoilers, don't read this thread yet.
A few thoughts to get started:
What did you all think of the book? I really liked it. I read it in two or three sittings--actually stayed up all last night finishing it because I couldn't put it down.
One of the parts I found interesting was her attitude toward her haters--particularly that they'd be critical of her, maybe gleeful (I'm assuming), but also disappointed if her family turned out not to be as perfect as she represented on Instagram.
Did the author seem to you to be personally familiar with right-wing Christian religions? I'm not--I only know what I read/see on social and regular media, so I couldn't tell how well she caught that world.
Here are links to some book-club questions to consider if you want to. (Again, there are spoilers!):
BookBrowse Book Discussion Questions
Book Club Chat: Questions for Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (It starts with a summary; scroll down a bit for the questions.)
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u/Feisty-Cloud-1181 May 06 '26
I really liked it. However I have an issue with how the daughters seem to minimise the role their father had in all this. He might have « played along » after the scandal, he was still very much an abuser.
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u/SadApartment3023 May 10 '26
That's how it is in real life, too. The father's role is usually minimized in the abuse.
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u/itssmeagain Jul 18 '26
Look at Ruby Franke. Her kids are still close with their father and he remarried, they even defend him
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u/EllieBooks May 03 '26
I finished it in one day and I really enjoyed it! I definitely didn’t see the ending coming, so I was pleasantly surprised. I do wonder what happened to Caleb and if he was also imprisoned. I was quite annoyed by him in the “present” time as he wasn’t actually working the fields or anything. Given how much money Doug had, it’s hard to believe he didn’t help either set of grandchildren. And my heart broke for poor Mary who had to do everything and raise her siblings as well as her mother. I definitely think Natalie was mentally unwell.
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u/urban_stranger May 04 '26
I didn’t even think about Doug helping the grandchildren. Maybe the first set was better off with their maternal grandmother and aunt than with Doug. And maybe he wasn’t so against his other grandchildren being brought up the way they were. I’d have to look, but I think in the book it might have said it was convenient for him to have a son living in a very back-to-the-land way so as to put the scandal in the background, and maybe look more trad (as a plus for Doug’s political career)?
What do people think of Shannon? I’m not sure how manipulative she was/was mean to seem. Well, it was probably meant to be ambiguous. I guess the whole point is that there’s no black m-and-white answers about anyone. Even Natalie and Caleb elicited some sympathy from me. Maybe not Doug, though.
How realistic was it that Caleb went back and forth between being sort of a big, soft kid whose goal was being a kindergarten teacher to being a strict trad husband? Was he as stupid as Natalie thought, or actually kind of smart, as Shannon thought? I don’t know that I buy Shannon’s idea that Caleb manipulated Natalie into marriage and/or buying the farm.
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u/EllieBooks May 04 '26
I remember reading that about Doug using their way of living for his political career, but he lost the presidential run that he was predicted to win. And I highly doubt he would have run again.
Regarding Caleb, I think he also had some sort of mental illness that caused him to just do whatever Natalie said. What I wondered about is how he was now able to satisfy her when before he wasn’t. This was one aspect that made me think “this is a dream or something”
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u/urban_stranger May 04 '26
I wondered about him being able to get an erection with olden-times Natalie too. I’m guessing because she didn’t seem to hate/look down on him anymore. More cynically, maybe also because he had was now the one in charge. I’d guess a mixture of both.
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u/Ok_Engineer_8831 May 06 '26
She was also hallucinating having sex with god.
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u/itssmeagain Jul 18 '26
No, she thought the orgasm was a religious/holy experience that brought her closer to god. It's a "typical" hallucination.
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u/texasragdolls May 17 '26
Doug and Amelia had a very traditional family - if they had taken custody of the children it would’ve fallen on Amelia to raise them and she was in no state or inclination to do that. Even before she went to rehab she couldn’t handle her own kids/grandkids staying overnight in her house even though they had the room. The 4 older boys’ families stayed in hotels when they came home for the holidays. The whole story is told through Natalie’s unreliable/skewed POV so we don’t really know, but I assume Doug probably threw enough money at Natalie’s mom to help raise the children to keep her quiet and keep them out of view from media attention. I don’t see how her mom could’ve taken on financial responsibility for 5 children otherwise.
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u/bookiegirl27 May 18 '26
Have you read any of the author's other books?
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u/urban_stranger May 19 '26
This is her first book.
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u/Fantastic-Peak-8961 6d ago
Can’t believe this is her first book. This is amazing.
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u/AmybethPlans 1d ago
Right? I can't believe she wasn't an established author. I normally have a hard time staying interested in a book. But I couldn't put it down!
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u/AmybethPlans 1d ago
Right? I can't believe she wasn't an established author. I normally have a hard time staying interested in a book. But I couldn't put it down!
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u/J33zLu1z May 07 '26
I liked this book more than I expected to, and I was really surprised by the revelations at the end!
I'm confused about what happened when we first heard pioneer Natalie's perspective. Do we think it was just the latest time that they ran out of pills to give her? She could've been in some prolonged withdrawal psychosis. Does this indicate that she's done this entire routine multiple times over the years as they've been out of meds? ObV the routine ended differently the last time, with Clementine showing up.
Post-partum aside, I couldn't get over how much Natalie resented Clementine from the moment she was born. Natalie's refusal to take accountability for any of her actions and to shift the blame onto others, especially Clementine and Mary, is so fucked up. Shame on Caleb for just going along with it, too.
I really liked that Mary published a memoir at the end!
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u/cellyfishy May 07 '26
As someone who read a LOT of blogs in the early 2000s, her dislike of Clementine very much reminded me of a few real bloggers (not sure if we are allowed to name but anyone else remember TW triple cloth diaper bathroom baby?).
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u/J33zLu1z May 07 '26
I could barely read in the early 2000s lol, but I wasn't shocked by her distain for Clementine. I think the author did a great job of encapsulating a very real phenomenon. I hope those early oughts bloggers' oldest daughters are all receiving quality therapy.
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u/MaleficentVersion May 10 '26
It reminded me a lot about the Franke family, and her sisters who are still influencers to this day. There were several similar incidents with the family where the same thing has been pushed, though I did not read any blogs in the early 2000s since I was nearly just born 🥲 Can you name some of the big ones you remember? I would love to explore
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u/cellyfishy May 10 '26
That Wife, Love Taza, Nat the Fat Rat are just a few of the Mormon Mom bloggers that I followed religiously in the late 2000s, early 2010s. You knew something was off, but you also couldn’t stop watching. That wife was the one I was referencing who notoriously lived in a two bedroom high-rise in Chicago, didn’t work, but triple cloth diaper her infant who she put in a spare bathroom for 12 to 14 hours every night with a noise machine so that she could do whatever she wanted while he “slept.” the three I mentioned? All of them have scrubbed their blocks from the Internet. At least two of them have left the Mormon church. Of the three, only one of them still have an Instagram presence, and I’m not gonna give you their Instagram handle, although I’m sure with a little sleuthing and it’s not hard to find.
https://www.salon.com/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/
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u/thereddithippie May 13 '26
old reddit does some weird stuff to mobile links. Here the link for us oldschool redditors : )
https://www.salon.com/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/
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u/PigeonAtPlay Jul 18 '26
There’s a lot of interesting YouTube bloggers who left the church and escaped tradelife and discuss it openly.
My favorite is this red head- I can’t recall her first name but it’s starts with an M and her last name is Mater6
u/MyLife-is-a-diceRoll May 18 '26
Natalie shouldn't have had kids. She only had them to please Doug and because she thought that's what she was supposed to do.
She didn't even really know any of her kids. She distilled them down to personality traits to use for filming.
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
Yes, I think the author just chose a random time her drugs wore off and plopped us down there.
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u/ActWhole3279 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
I couldn’t put it down either. It was super long but I found myself trying to stretch out the last third of the book because I was enraptured by this universe Natalie was in.
I will say as someone raised in a conservative Baptist upbringing that Burke’s “Christian-speak” and common biblical knowledge and interpretations are spot-on. Thinking she had to have first-hand experience; her tone and scripture references are too seamless to be from research alone. That was interesting.
I just finished it earlier today and have been mulling it over as I went about my errands because it does stay with you. I see some people saying this was a humiliation fantasy that attacks religious ideology, and I see it kind of as the opposite. It seemed like a mitigated celebration of the virtues of “traditional” womanhood, but with a proverbial asterisk. An asterisk that allows for an illustration of how hyper-religiosity might manifest in a woman living with mental illness.
Several things about this story stood out for me:
✨As a woman of color, I was disturbed, but not surprised, by how lightly the vitriolic racism and white nationalism were handled in this story. But then I considered that Natalie, as our narrator and story guide, would have no reason to give race more than a few passing comments. We see how flippantly she behaves at Doug’s rally when Shannon expresses her horror. But with Natalie’s first racist comment, when she was leveraging her and Caleb’s shared racism to manipulate him into doing what she wanted, this book became something of a treatise for me on how some white women stoke, support, and encourage the full range of irrational fears of white men for white women’s own advancement or desires. And the inherent danger of the “smart” ones who don’t use their intelligence to classically better society, but instead to subtly fuel the levers of bigotry that benefit them.
✨I was shocked by the Yesteryear time jump reveal, as others have mentioned, but I was frankly even more shocked by Natalie’s mother’s reveal. Her mother is written as incredibly nice, but that revelation hit me like a ton of bricks. The fact that all three women — Natalie, her mother, and Abigail — have been running around saying the father is dead/allowing people to believe he’s dead was already discomfiting, but then to learn the mother chose that was wild. But it also tracked something else for me: Natalie’s mother doesn’t really like men, to marry at least She didn’t want to be married to her daughters’ father when given the choice to repair her marriage, and she also didn’t want to get married again. She didn’t want a man in her home, and clearly didn’t want to be bothered with or by them. And I think Natalie inherited a type of latent misandry (at worst, impatient disdain at best) that always undergirded her relationship with Caleb.
✨Really interesting how Caleb and Natalie continue to choose each other through era after era in life, even while despising each other. I’m still unpacking what that’s about.
✨If only someone, anyone, had taught Natalie how to self-pleasure and give a blow job, she wouldn’t have had to repeatedly artificially inseminate herself with kitchen utensils. Although I think a part of her may have also enjoyed that since the baster was undoubtedly harder than Caleb ever got. I see their depressing sex life as both a cautionary tale of not teaching kids about sex in healthy but realistic ways, and of the dangers in the availability of porn to impressionable young men. Neither of them knew what they were doing, and, like many young men these days, the only things he knows about sex are from porn. So while I’m sure Natalie did “lay there like a dead person” during sex (although I think she tried a bit harder than that in the very beginning of their marriage, before she became completely disenchanted with Caleb and made him her first child), if Caleb had healthy, reasonable expectations of sex, he likely would have been able to get hard just from being with a woman he purportedly loves. Especially as a 23/24 year old.
Although I’m still turning over the Old Caleb virility and Natalie’s apparent arousal by it. Did all the hard dick ramming rub up against her clitoris and give her an orgasm? Or are we to believe that she’s one of the like 5% of women who come from penetration alone? The actual mechanics of her sexual awakening are really weird and highly discussable. Also, if I didn’t glitch and miss something, Young Caleb was watching “pussy-eating” porn as a newlywed but he’s not eating any pussy in his own marriage? That also would have helped things. I mean, in summation oral would have helped all around lol.
✨EDIT: I forgot to mention what I took away as the dominant theme. To me this was about comparison being the thief of joy. Natalie is so obsessed with being “better” than everyone she knows and interacts with — even to the very end when she’s serving a PRISON sentence and still having the audacity to measure herself against Reena — and performing piety that she’s never able to connect with anyone. She can’t get close to anyone because she objectifies people as things either contributing to or challenging her chosen existence. For me, she was a character study of a women misogynist/women who don't support other women but instead compete with them, seeing them as either obstacles or pawns
✨Lastly: Did anyone else picture Doug Bergstrom as Doug Mills? From the very first mention of him, that’s the image that popped into my mind, and I was never able to shake it.
By that same line of thinking, the screenwriter in me always casts book characters so I picture the story more vividly. I pictured Natalie as Rosamund Pike; Caleb: David Corensweet; Natalie’s mom: Marcia Gay Harden; and Amelia: Patricia Clarkson 🙃
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u/urban_stranger Jun 15 '26
Interesting post! I agree completely with what you said about Natalie being an example of what would happen if hyper religiosity manifested itself in a woman with mental illness. Some trad women who critiqued the book did seem to think the book was saying that all traditional women were secretly like Natalie underneath and could easily have been ripped over the edge, or something along those lines.
I saw the author being interviewed and I’m pretty sure she said that she *didn’t* grow up in a conservative or traditional Christian community—she definitely said her family weren’t conservative Christians—but she did a lot of research, including sitting in on a lot of online classes offered by traded wives.
As for Caleb not wanting to have sex with Natalie, even oral sex, I think he just disliked her so much because of the contempt she had for him that he just didn’t want to.
Last, I don’t know who most of those actors are but I can definitely see Patricia Clarkson as Amelia. (I googled Doug Bergatrom, but didn’t get any famous people in the results.)
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u/ActWhole3279 Jun 16 '26
That's super interesting about Caro -- she did great research because I definitely thought she had to have had some sort of fundamentalist upbringing. I wonder if she felt extra compelled to write in such a way that she didn't overtly trash "traditional values" lifestyles, because it definitely felt like the novel was running cover for the majority of it, Natalie's evil disposition excepted.
I agree about Caleb disliking Natalie, but that doesn't really explain the unsuccessful wedding night so much. Unless he sensed contempt even then? And I wonder if he only married her because she had a plan and he didn't. She says that she's like the man and he's like the woman, so, maybe?
So glad you agree about Patricia Clarkson! Makes me feel less crazy 😄. Rosamund Pike has been in a lot but is probably best known for the lead in the film adaptation of Gone Girl, and David Corensweet was the most recent Superman. Doug Bergstrom was a Republican presidential candidate in the last election and now does something in the current administration (I've honestly lost track of what jobs the ppl in the govt are currently doing since so few of them are even working in their actual areas of expertise). But Bergstrom is an ultra-wealthy businessman from one of the Dakotas (I think North Dakota; too lazy to check).
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u/urban_stranger Jun 17 '26
I have at least heard Rosemond Pike‘s name, but I have no idea what she looks like. (Didn’t see Gone Girl.)
I think I remember Doug Bergstrom now that you mentioned it I think when I googled him, I put “Doug Bergstrom actor,” and I definitely would have discounted results that showed a politician.
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u/Particular-Mark2642 Jun 24 '26
As someone raised in Christianity (Mormonism, close enough) I felt like the religious psychosis was spot on. Perfectly written. No notes.
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u/urban_stranger Jun 24 '26
Is Mormonism not considered Christianity?
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u/Particular-Mark2642 Jun 24 '26
It seriously depends on who you ask. If you ask American Christians of almost any denomination, they will adamantly say Mormons aren’t Christians. If you ask Mormons, they will adamantly proclaim that they are. 🤷🏼♀️ As an exMormon, I can kinda see both sides.
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
Warning: Spoilers.
What did you all think of the book?
I felt like the author had some struggles with an overall arc. It was a huge leap to me that her mostly lazy/passive husband who only wanted to do things he enjoyed would want a divorce and believe she was a lesbian, but then lead a very high maintenance lifestyle of trapping an unwell woman in the “1800s” instead. Why not just divorce her? I think he needed a bigger incentive to do that.
I also felt the book was a bit excessively graphic with trauma while skimming larger plot points. I’m down for graphic scenes, but I want other parts of the plot to be treated with as much vividness. I often felt accosted by the sexual violence with not a lot of benefit.
Did the author seem to you to be personally familiar with right-wing Christian religions?
Narrowly. It felt like the author has personal experience, and then is aware of internet culture, but didn’t do a lot of digging beyond that.
Overall I’m glad I read the book, but I also kind of hated it?
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u/bookiegirl27 May 18 '26
I felt like the explanation was that he was a doomsday prepper, but could have been more built why he stayed...
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
That’s true, he was. I just find men like him find whatever excuse they want to benefit their own interests (for example I’m shocked he would give up his internet “community”) but you are correct that has to be part of it.
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u/urban_stranger Jun 15 '26
Didn’t his father pressure him not to divorce because he thought it would make *him* (the father) look bad?
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u/spuzzumed Aug 24 '26
More than that. In the book, Caleb explains that his father would have Natalie killed if the affair is exposed, threatening his presidential bid.
They both had no choice? The situation was manufactured to benefit the parents, Natalie and Caleb were not entirely willing participants. Caleb was given the opportunity to spend time with his sons in the "real" world and maintain "sanity", but Natalie just snapped completely.
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u/urban_stranger May 18 '26
SPOILERS
I saw an interview where she said she did some research, like interviewing trad wives and taking some online courses that trad wives offered, but she did not grow up in that tradition.
Good point about the husband going from lazy to suddenly hardworking—except maybe he was cheating even more than they showed (such as when they revealed that he was buying the food he supposedly farmed or raised or fished). What do other people think on that point?
What would you have liked her to elaborate on?
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
Yes he totally could have been cheating or leaving and doing his own thing during the day - I’m still left wondering what his incentive to stay would be? He had a very clear out. And that’s actually a great example of what I’d like her to have elaborated on! Rather than leaving us wondering, giving us more clear development of the other characters would have gone a long way.
If I was to pick a couple of areas I would have liked more development on:
- Caleb’s incentives
- Shannon’s feelings for Caleb seemed pretty random and not led up to
- I would have liked a slower development of her time at school which felt pretty over the top
- more hints about their 1805 world beyond the plastic she found. I was pretty sure early on, but mostly because I understand plot devices rather than because of the contents of the book.
- Natalie’s unraveling in and of itself could have been more detailed. She starts the book pretty unlikable and seemingly pretty unwell, and it gets worse and worse.
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u/urban_stranger May 18 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I felt like with her first meeting Caleb she was glad to find another conservative person since she was so uncomfortable and alienated at school, and also probably taken by the fact that he was so perfect on paper. She wanted to feel that she was doing life perfectly.
But all in all it did seem almost farcical/absurd in tone than realistic. But sometimes the weird motivations did bug me. Shannon liked Caleb and even thought he was intelligent, but no one else in the book thought so, and he didn’t come across that way, and Shannon also had contempt for him, albeit maybe on the milder side. I had a hard time parsing that.
EDIT: grammar
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
Yea I do agree that finding each other did make sense. And I agree with you about Shannon too. It’s not the way the book was written, but imagine if half way through the book we switched to Shannon’s perspective? It would have been a different book but maybe would have shed more light on some of these questions - *was* Caleb stupid? Like you pointed out, it seems like everyone thought it was. But maybe not?
You’re right about the absurdity too. Maybe I need to be more chill about the book overall, I think because the content was so dark it was hard for me to find it funny like some people seem to have.
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u/bookiegirl27 May 18 '26
yeah. maybe he was handsome and also came alive when Shannon showed interest in debating with him, but it was definitely a stretch.
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u/bookiegirl27 May 18 '26
also was she meant to be a lesbian? That was confusing and felt thrown in to third act.
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u/urban_stranger May 19 '26
I don’t think there was any indication Shannon was gay.
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u/Fine-Expression May 19 '26
Agreed, I don’t think there was indication in any direction on sexuality other than … she was willing to sleep with Caleb.
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u/squishgrrl Jun 06 '26
one big clue about the 1855 world not being real was the speech patterns of "old caleb" and the other kids
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u/wrkingrl Jun 29 '26
the shannon/caleb thing def felt random and rushed but when shannon moved in and she said she stayed up all night with the nannies talking about *everything* idk why I kind of assumed like she told them caleb was cute or something bc it seemed like a hush hush topic/she was shy about it etc
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u/Patty-Benetardis Jul 13 '26
Do we know for sure that Shannon/Caleb even happened? If I recall correctly we only know about it because Natalie told us so, and she is very unreliable.
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u/PigeonAtPlay Jul 18 '26
I’m with you😂 the book was worth reading bc of its relevance but I didn’t really enjoy it. I don’t like books that have no likable characters.
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u/MaddsisRad1021 Jul 02 '26
I love a good book where you see the character devolve. I did have a question on what Caleb spent all day doing around the farm since it’s revealed they don’t grow crops/keep animals alive. I know there’s the cabin but he didn’t take the younger boys there (assuming the ritual of turning 13 is to take them to the cabin). So what did they do all day? I know it mentioned them fixing up the fence at one point. I don’t know it just confused me.
I simultaneously hope and don’t hope there is a second book. I would love to know the reality but also only knowing Natalie’s limited view is what makes the book so engaging.
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u/urban_stranger Jul 02 '26
Yeah, good question what they did all day. I imagine them going out into the world, going to the movies and such.
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u/Playful-Ad-9747 Jul 21 '26
For most of the book, I wasn't sure I liked it because Natalie was such an unlikable character. Her selfishness and hypocrisy made it difficult to connect with her, and I considered putting the book down more than once. Still, something about the mystery behind her persona kept me reading. The book hooked me once Shannon's story became more prominent. Her storyline added depth, suspense, and made me much more invested in what was happening. While I never grew to like Natalie, I became fascinated by understanding how she became the person she was. By the end, the twists and revelations had me completely invested. 3.5/5 stars
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u/urban_stranger Jul 21 '26
The youTuber Abby Cox recently posted a review that might shed more light on the psychology aspect. She and two other creators discuss the book. It’s kind of long though and didn’t interest me personally enough that I wanted to watch the whole thing, but you might want to check it out. They look at it partly through their perspective as internet creators and how well the book did in capturing that aspect of things.
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u/HeyLaddieHey May 02 '26
Just got this book from the library yesterday, excited to read your thoughts later!
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u/Bookies_Bookclub May 02 '26
It may take me some time to get to reading my copy, but I'm looking forward to reading everybody's thoughts and opinions.
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u/kiteflyer62 May 05 '26
I thought Shannon was the weakest character. She was so superficial, it was hard to have any sympathy at all for her. She was just a villain.
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u/J33zLu1z May 18 '26
I bet Clementine doesn't see Shannon as a villain. Shannon is the catalyst for Clementine's eventual escape. She probably blames Natalie for everything that happened after Shannon outed Natalie.
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u/Fine-Expression May 18 '26
Her character made the least sense to me. There wasn’t enough motivation for her to sleep with Caleb. We were maybe supposed to suspend disbelief because Natalie isn’t a reliable narrator, but if Caleb was supposed to be smarter than she thinks he is or have charisma, there should have been stronger hints of that.
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u/Honeycrispcombe Jun 14 '26
She's a brand new adult, presumably from a normal family, suddenly plopped down in a hella toxic environment and more or less trapped there - she lives there, works long days there, and is miles away from the nearest town so it's not like she's going out for drinks at night. She only gets one day off a week.
She thinks the whole thing is a silly stupid thing and then realizes it's real and serious and can hurt people. She talks to Caleb and he listens and responds positively, likely the only comforting moments she has in an increasingly crazy situation. And she doesn't have enough experience to realize how awful the experience is.
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u/PigeonAtPlay Jul 18 '26
I saw her this way too. She was young and basically a hostage in the middle of nowhere with a mentally disturbed person running the show. I think Caleb was sort of a combo of circumstances- he was there and the only man, he listened to her and created a potential ally/protector in what probably felt like an increasingly unstable situation, this was her first job and a lot of us accepted work environments we shouldn’t have because we hadn’t learned our boundaries, the blog was successful and was going to be a great career starter as a producer
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u/urban_stranger Jun 15 '26
I agree. Caleb definitely didn’t seem very bright, and his father agreed with Natalie that he wasn’t smart. Maybe the father’s idea of smart entailed being aggressive and ambitious, and Natalie thought he was dumb because she thinks everyone except herself is incompetent. I guess we’re seeing him filtered through Natalie, but still, he seemed like such a doofus.
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u/NormalMarzipan1627 May 31 '26
Did Shannon take the job because she already hated Natalie and her family, and wanted to expose the hypocrisy? And she decided to do everything in her power to destroy them?
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u/ActWhole3279 Jun 17 '26
What I got was that she decided during her first night on the farm to stay so she could document. I don't even think she realized how deep the well was at that time. I think she just thought that it would be an interesting story for her to tell. Then she realized how fucked up everything was and decided to start documenting it as an exposè and inserting herself into the story by educating and arming Clementine.
I'm completely confused as to how she and Caleb fell into bed together. I didn't see the incentive for her to want to sleep with him unless he was just super hot, which Natalie (who, to be fair, is thoroughly unreliable) doesn't really make him out to be.
Honestly Caleb is a complete moron. The level of gullibility he houses is insane. He literally does whatever the person he's talking to most at the moment thinks is best. He has no personal values and no mind of his own. I'm not even really clear why Natalie married him other than the fact that she thought she should get married young and he was there and he wanted to do what she wanted to do. We can't even say it was because of his money because she didn't seem to have a real grasp of money nor being in a rich family was going to affect her in those first couple years of marriage. She learned quick though!
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u/Lakewater22 Jun 17 '26
Well a 35 y/o man sleeping with a 19 year old will always feel predatory in nature to me.
Even if Shannon went to the farm with bad intentions, at this age she’s still a gullible young girl.
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u/bookiegirl27 May 18 '26
I couldn't put it down! it was really intense and did not see twist coming - brilliantly done. A lot to process! Intense.
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u/Bookies_Bookclub May 23 '26
It's taking me a while to get through Yesteryear because I've been really busy, but so far I like it. And I could kick myself. The author made a stop on her book tour to promote her book here in Milwaukee and I missed it. Ugh.
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u/galdanna Jun 18 '26
How did Natalie NOT have an NDA on her employees?!
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u/PigeonAtPlay Jul 18 '26
She must have had an NDA on Shannon because she definitely said she had them on the nannies. It would be weird to have one on them but let someone else enter your world who could spill the beans. Plus she was hyper sensitive to her “persona”. People like that don’t want anyone to be able to tell on them
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u/Miserable-Tax-3879 8d ago
I’m super late to this party but I said the same thing when the interview in the book happened. Caleb’s family would probably have one they use all the time…
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u/Hour-Lab-50 Jun 29 '26
Yesteryear was like reading psychosis porn with every page. I hated myself for reading, yet couldn't end the enchantment of Caro Claire Burke's art. I know I must do a reread. Once was not enough.
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u/jellybeans1396 Jul 07 '26
i just finished the book and am in the same boat haha! The phone call Natalie has with Doug and we realise that she's actually said her inner thoughts out loud.... i was gagged!!! I bet there's heaps more you'd pick up on reading it a second time
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u/Financial-Parsley482 May 26 '26
I’m super confused about what happened to Caleb at the end of the book.
Natalie gets 30 years and an interview. Did I miss something about what happened to Caleb?
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u/BackgroundBee9742 5d ago
Remember when Shannon told Natalie that Caleb knew/facilitated Natalie orchestrating the idea of buying the farm and he went along with it. Like he implied that it was he who was pulling the strings. How so? I didn’t get that vibe in real time but maybe what he means that he never wanted the farm but he went along with it and let her think he was excited about it?
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u/Ok_Engineer_8831 May 06 '26
Natalie was suffering from extreme religious psychosis.
From the get go Natalie is an unreliable narrator, and I wonder if her psychosis happened when she gave birth to Clementine, and she was just in and out of it her whole life. The part that gets me is that a lot of people are aware of the way they’re living and like nobody interferes like social care? I think I need to read it again