Let me get the “review” part out of the way first. I liked Yesteryear. I remember seeing Caro Claire Burke’s TikToks discussing tradwife culture and Ballerina Farms way back when, and when I started hearing about her novel (and about all the buzz around it), I knew I’d be reading it, and likely enjoying it. And that’s how it went! I read it quickly, over two nights, and found it dark, sometimes funny, and on the whole, interesting. It’s a satire about a tradwife influencer named Natalie Heller Mills who wakes up living the pioneer fantasy she’s been roleplaying to her millions of followers (and haters). I thought the whole book was nuts, and I was entertained start to finish.
And that’s really all I have to say about the book. Because what I really want to review is the *conversation* around the book. Specifically, the discourse around Natalie being so unlikeable that the book becomes bad.
Before I read the book, I kept seeing review videos talking about how the main character of Yesteryear is evil or unlikeable or whatever. Which… ok. Natalie is unlikable.
She’s disconnected from her role as a mom, she’s unkind, she’s a fundamentalist and closed-minded, she’s racist, she’s vain, and so on and so forth. But negative reviews keep referencing that unlikability as if it’s a flaw in the book, instead if like… the point.
Natalie’s flaws are a feature, not a bug.
The fact that so many people dislike her (read: can’t extend her the most basic courtesy we hand out to unpleasant men in fiction, btw) stands out to me as the problem.
Don Draper lies and is cruel to EVERYONE (even PEGGY)!! Tony Soprano literally kills people! Walter White cooks meth!!! Tony Montano lies, is cruel, sells drugs, AND kills people!!!!!
And every one of those characters is not only iconic, but beloved, and even rooted for. Because we don’t NEED male characters to be good people! We don’t even need them to be sorry. We only need our male antiheroes to be one thing:
Interesting.
Give us an interesting monster and we’ll buy posters of his movies, follow him for seven seasons, and write think pieces on his impact on culture afterwards. When men do shitty things in books or movies or shows, we ask about his character development, or about what his violent actions say about masculinity in America.
Now make that character a woman. When a woman does unforgivable things, we, apparently, say her entire story is bad. Or we just want to know if her character was made to suffer sufficiently. Did she learn? Her character arc gets condensed down to whether or not she learned her lesson and paid a great enough price (and even when she does, we still hate her, rather than love to hate her, or whatever complicated feelings we have towards male antiheroes).
And this is even with Natalie being white.
We love Walter White despite everything.
Would we have loved him as a Black male lead? A Brown one? A woman? Consider that Walter’s wife SKYLER was hated, and her crime was being angry at her lying, drug peddling husband. As Anna Gun, who played Skyler White, wrote in a New York Times piece:
As an actress, I realize that viewers are entitled to have whatever feelings they want about the characters they watch. But as a human being, I’m concerned that so many people react to Skyler with such venom. Could it be that they can’t stand a woman who won’t suffer silently or “stand by her man”? That they despise her because she won’t back down or give up? Or because she is, in fact, Walter’s equal?
Anna Gun
And as she went on to point out, similar sentiments have been shared about other wives-of-“complex-male-characters” on television, including Carmela Soprano and Betty Draper. And the wives aren’t even the “bad guys” on these shows.
To be clear though, me saying “the discourse is misogynistic” isn’t me saying “you have to like Yesteryear just because I liked it.” I’m not linking to the articles that trash talk Natalie’s persona as a reason the book is bad here, because you can Google and find those articles with ease. There have been some criticisms of the craft of the book, or about its execution of its intended goals.
I’ve also read some reviews I agreed with—Jennie at Dear Author describes understanding that Natalie is meant to be read as satire; Amber Reu’s Substack review is literally titled “No one likes a mad woman”, and she describes the same phenomenon I’m discussing here.
And of course, I’ve said my own piece about Yesteryear coming now in a long line of books about white women, by white women, published in an industry that centers white stories by white authors… Yes, this is yet. another. story. about a white woman, by a white women.
But, and this should go without saying, that doesn’t make the book bad.
And anyway, that’s not why people are mad at Yesteryear!
If industry critique was people’s issue, they’d be saying “this book shouldn’t exist,” not “I didn’t like this woman.”
People aren’t mad that publishing centered another white woman’s story! They’re just mad that the woman in the story behaves badly and the book doesn’t make her suffer enough for it.
MOST mainstream stories center white men. And you can have a million Walters, and Dons, and Tonys, and it won’t change how we think of white men and who they are. They get to be individuals forver and ever.
Now count the mainstream stories centering Brown women.
…I’ll wait.
Ok, you got 3: The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, and Sex Lives of College Girls.
(All Mindy projects, produced by the same person).
And none of those main characters are evil murders/drug peddlers/mafiosos btw. They feature compelling Brown leads, but none of them is meant to be an antihero to begin with.
Ok now count a mainstream story about a Brown antihero.
(They exist, btw, they’re just not mainstream. Because the mainstream would NOT be able to handle them, and would possibly hate them).
In my prequel to The River’s Daughter, The River Goddess, centers a goddess/woman named Naga who is also (although in an entirely different way) a problematic female character. She takes whatever she wants, she destroys plenty, and she is not written to be likable.
But she is written to be powerful. If you can only root for a woman who does right by you, you’ll probably hate her.
In The River’s Daughter, the primary novel in the world of Jaraan, there are plenty of problematic female characters, some meant to be the antagonists, but some who are meant to be sympathetic characters (yet who are still problematic / unlikable). There are some characters that I hope you as the reader would dislike.
But if that’s cause for you to dislike the book, I’d recommend not reading that one either.
Thee problem is we’re happy to cheer for antiheroes, villains, and monsters.
As long as they’re men.
— Punita
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