Yesteryear

LoveReading Says

Natalie Heller Mills wakes at 5.58am, ready to greet the day. She never uses the snooze button. Not once. Sobriety helps. Discipline helps too. And Natalie has discipline in spades. At 32, six months pregnant with her sixth child, she lives on Yesteryear Ranch, tucked into the rolling Idaho landscape between two mountain ranges, with husband Caleb and children Clementine, Samuel, Stetson, Jessa and Junebug.

Caleb is the youngest of five boys, part of a formidable American dynasty. His father is the latest senator in a long line of senators - veteran, ultimate patriarch and quite possibly the next President of the United States.

Natalie, meanwhile, is perfection personified.

Or at least Natalie Heller Mills of the Yesteryear Ranch instagram account is.

She is, in her own words, the “manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies”, a “flawless Christian woman” and ultimately, gloriously, “perfect at being alive.”

And five million Insta followers agree.

We meet Natalie as producer Shannon is setting up the video equipment in her kitchen for another long day of content creation. Instagram has just tipped past five million followers; YouTube is approaching one million. Being a mother, wife and influencer simultaneously is, Natalie tells us, like “breastfeeding three babies” while “seducing three lovers at once.” Welcome to Yesteryear.

I was fascinated by Natalie from the off. She is monstrous, magnificent, ambitious, manipulative, frequently hilarious and utterly convinced of her own brilliance. 

But this perfectly curated slice of old-fashioned American life is nothing of the sort.

Harvard educated and top three in her class, Natalie hasn’t accidentally stumbled into Instagram fame. Yesteryear has been constructed. The Instagram account begins the day they sign for the ranch.  After she convinces her wealthy father-in-law to buy the $5 million farm to give her directionless husband a purpose. And brick by brick, post by post, baby by baby, Natalie creates the American dream.

Then something goes very, very wrong. The novel moves between The Past and The Present, and suddenly Natalie finds herself inside another Yesteryear. It resembles her life but feels like a bruised and battered version of it. These are her mountains. This is her land. But this is not her house and this is most definitely not her family. Has she travelled through time? Is she trapped? Is this some kind of reality show? And  - most importantly - is somebody watching?

This is where Yesteryear becomes wonderfully bonkers. This is much more than a book about tradwives. It’s about families and the roles we expect people to play within them. It’s about religion, motherhood, ambition, control and marriage. It’s about making the “right” decisions - and who gets to decide what right looks like. Above all, it’s about pretence: living your life as though somebody is always watching.

Natalie doesn’t simply want a husband; she needs Caleb to perform his allotted role in the fantasy too: “I need you to do the things I cannot do and be the things I cannot be. I need you to be a man.”

Because Natalie may ostensibly be selling female submission, but there is absolutely nothing submissive about Natalie Heller Mills.

That contradiction runs deliciously through the whole novel. And beneath all the madness are some really interesting questions.

What actually makes us happy? How many apparently functional families and superglue-tight marriages are being held together by sheer force of will? How much of life is simply faking it until you make it?

And what happens when you’ve faked it so successfully that millions of people believe you?

Natalie has spent years creating Online Natalie, but increasingly the distinction between the woman and the character becomes difficult to find. She doesn’t particularly care whether people like her. She cares whether they believe she’s real.

Yesteryear is biting, clever, ridiculous, uncomfortable and completely compelling. Natalie is appalling at times, brilliant at others and almost impossible to look away from - which, of course, is rather the point. Five stars

Deborah Maclaren

About Yesteryear

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

Read the full description

Find This Book In