The People Want a Revenge Fantasy
Substack critics hate "Yesteryear," this year's buzziest book, for all the same reasons that everyone else loves it.
If you’ve been on Substack for even a few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of people really do not like Yesteryear, the hottest book of the year, which The New York Times urges its readers to buy.
Basically, the premise is this: a tradwife influencer named Natalie (not-so-obliquely based on the homestead influencer Ballerina Farm, or Hannah Neeleman) is transported back to the 1800s to live out the lifestyle she hypocritically valorizes online. Even people who hated the book admit the premise is good, and you get the sense many of them wish they had thought of it themselves. It’s such a good premise, in fact, that it will soon be a movie, starring Anne Hathaway.
Despite the sharp idea, Substack reviews (at least the viral ones I’ve seen—I’m sure there are others) have been nearly unanimously negative, citing that the author, Caro Claire Burke, has failed to extend any degree of empathy or humanity to the main character or women like her—and this is doubly disturbing when you consider that the main character is transparently based on a real person. Some writers have even gone so far as to compare the book to a “revenge fantasy that verges on torture porn,” lacking nuance and humanity for the main character, who you’re simply supposed to loathe, and slammed for not really doing the research into what fundamentalist Christian women (the author interviewed ex-Christian women for her research) are actually like. Writer Louise Perry goes a step farther and says that Caro Claire Burke has a problem with women.
But as much as people on Substack talk about it as if it were one of the most egregious pieces of fiction to be published in modern history—everyone else loves it. It has 4.2 stars on Amazon and 4 stars on Goodreads. One reviewer eloquently praises:
What in the ACTUAL tradwife MAGA MAHA conservative Christian manosphere clusterf*ck social media world do we live in that makes this bonkers book seem so REAL?
Look, I’m not here to make a judgment on whether or not Yesteryear was objectively good or bad. What I am interested in, however, is the fact that even if most people on Substack perceive Yesteryear as a one-dimensional revenge fantasy aimed at tradwives…that’s what a lot of people actually want to read.
