My sister posted a few weeks ago about our shared obsession with anything adjacent to “Little House on the Prairie.” It was the early 80’s. Michael Landon starred as the frequently bare-chested Charles “Pa” Ingalls in the television drama adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. I was barely in elementary school, so I paid no attention to Pa Ingall’s six-pack. I paid a lot of attention to Laura’s braided hair and her bonnets. And her numerous sisters. I had long brown braids, just like Laura’s! Our mom sewed us our own bonnets and matching ruffled nightgowns. I had a lot of sisters, just like Laura.
We lived in rural central Pennsylvania when our “Little House” fascination began. Or, rather, we were born into our “Little House” era. Amish farms surrounded our small town. (The town often smelled like manure.) Our family drove past the farms in our station wagon, and I watched Amish kids my age run around barefoot. Amish families travelled past our house in their black, horse-drawn buggies. An Amish family even owned the local bakery / bookstore! (Mom took me to the Amish store and I picked out a book for myself. The owners’ son rang me up at the counter. He had six fingers on each hand. Mom told me that the young man’s parents established a store for him to run because he was unable to work on the family farm. Years later, I saw a photo in my high school biology textbook of a six-fingered hand that resembled the hands of the store owners’ son. The book introduced me to the term “Ellis-van Creveld syndrome,” a “genetic disorder in the Amish community.”)
The town’s volunteer fire chief owned the deli directly across the street from the volunteer fire station. The fire chief answered the fire department’s landline phone while he filled deli orders. The all-volunteer ambulance station sat next to the fire station. My dad volunteered on the ambulance crew because the town was so small that everyone had to volunteer to do something, or else the town wouldn’t have basic emergency services. That’s how small and isolated our town was. When our elderly neighbor suffered a fatal sudden cardiac arrest, my dad was on the ambulance crew that responded. Another time, a local Amish boy fell out of a hay loft and suffered a head injury. Dad had to drive the ambulance that transported him 50 miles to Hershey Medical Center. Medical helicopter evacuations didn’t exist in our community back in the “olden days” of my childhood.
I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original “Little House” books, and also that bummer of a memoir about her newlywed life “The First Four Years.” (Spoiler alert: Laura and Almonzo’s infant son dies. Their crop fails at least once, maybe several times. Then, she burns down their first house in a cooking accident.)
Our aunt gifted us a book titled “The Hunky-Dory Dairy” by Anne Lindbergh about an eleven-year-old girl who meets a farm family that is stuck in time in the 1800’s. The girl from the twentieth century shows the girl from the 1800’s her Sony Walkman cassette player. (It was the 80’s, after all.) The girl from the 1800’s teaches the girl from the twentieth century how to make butter and stuff.
So, I’m a sucker for books about rural life in the 1800’s, or about people who romanticize this rural, 1800’s-ish life.
My sister K. taught me how to use a public library this past March. Okay, not really. I worked in my college’s library for four years. When I was fresh out of college, I used the computers at my local library almost every day after work so that I could look for a better-paying job. (I was too cheap or too poor to pay for my own internet access.) Then, I got rich and lazy and I paid for my own internet access and purchased all of the books that I wanted to read. However, K. is a librarian. One of her favorite topics is “how to use a library card to get free stuff.” K. inspired me to “refresh” my library card, because I hadn’t used it for so long that it expired.
I added myself to my local library’s hold list for the novel “Yesteryear,” by Caro Claire Burke. I did this at the beginning of April. At that time, there were at least 50 holds on the county’s 18 physical copies of the book. It seemed to me that it would be a fun story that involved time travel to the 1800’s. I had no idea until yesterday that Anne Hathaway already signed a contract to produce a movie adaptation of this novel. I don’t follow anything on TikTok and the only reason that I know that BookTok exists is because I heard about it on a podcast.
Anyway, my “turn” for one of the 18 county-wide copies of “Yesteryear” came up on Thursday. I read the book on Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday because rained all three days. I returned the book to the library Saturday afternoon so that the next person on the list could read it.
Here’s what I think about “Yesteryear“: It’s a weird book.
The protagonist is a social media influencer by the name of Natalie Heller Mills. She is a parody of Pioneer Woman’s Ree Drummond or else that family with 18 kids. Anyway, she marries into a rich, conservative Christian family and her father-in-law gives her the money to buy a farm in Idaho. She has an Instagram account promoting her large family and their lifestyle as “homesteaders.” She is a “tradwife.”
However, it’s all fake. They buy most of their food at the grocery store, because her husband is actually a terrible farmer. They depend on their immigrant farmworkers and their household staff in order to function. They mistreat “the help.”
Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in hell. Actually, she wakes up in what appears to be the year 1855. Life as a woman bites for her. Modern medical care doesn’t exist in this new universe. The entire family is filthy. Her husband physically assaults her. (Warning: this book does describe the sexual assault of adult women.)
The book alternates between life in this hellish new universe and flashbacks to Natalie’s journey from a high-achieving high school track star and Harvard scholarship student, to her marriage to the son of a wealthy politician, to her success as a grifting social medical influencer.
My husband Jonathan bought me several books for our anniversary last month. He confessed that he “almost” bought me this book, but in the end decided not to because he “wasn’t sure whether I would like it.” (He didn’t know that I had this on my “to be read” list.) On Amazon, the hardcover is currently $19.50 marked down from $30, and the paperback is currently $29.82. (Yes, Amazon is selling the hardcover for LESS than they are selling the paperback.) I assume that the book costs $30 or close to $30 at a real bookstore. I’m glad that I waited for my turn at a library copy.
Part of me feels that the author wrote the book in order to “teach the reader a lesson,” but I’m still not sure what that lesson was supposed to be. Yeah, I already knew that life as a woman was terrible in the 1800’s and that life as a woman can still be bad in the 2000’s. I already knew that most of social media is fake. I already knew that modern medicine is good. I already knew that a lot of “Christian” culture is designed to make women feel badly about themselves. I already knew that life is easier when you’re rich. I already knew that it’s really easy when you have a lot of money to judge the choices of people who don’t have a lot of money.
I feel like a terrible person to admit this, but I laughed reading this book. I feel terrible because several women and children get hurt. However, it’s a dark comedy. I imagine that some readers will choose this book because it is fan fiction about a social media influencer – someone like Pioneer Woman who is already rich – who “gets her comeuppance.”
I posted above a photo that I took of our own house yesterday. Our house was built in the 1890’s and we like historic architecture. We also like having lived in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. I imagine that most of the readers of “Yesteryear” also like living in the year 2026. Otherwise, they wouldn’t choose to read a book about how awful it is to live in the past.