Fantasy, time travel, Christian satire, and a polarizing, unlikable main character (Natalie), a social influencer, in a first-person narrative. She lives on a ranch called Yesteryear in Idaho, which the author uses as a setting for a polemic. Natalie is crafted to lead people to think that Christianity has a check-the-box structure, rather than a faith based on relationship. Yesteryear is not historical fiction, another misleading aspect of the book. She is married to a totally unpleasant, unfaithful, and incompetent Harvard graduate who is marketed as the perfect husband and father in a perfect nuclear family, who is living off his father’s wealth.
Nothing is as it seems or appears on social media, and it gets worse. If Burke is trying to comment on our cancel culture, post-facts politics, tradwifes, and gender role dyslexia, she has done great job. Natilie wakes up in 1855 and the ranch life that was staged for Instagram is suddenly real. She “feels frozen in the pages of a children’s nursery rhyme.”