Fantasy, time travel, 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. The author uses Natalie to portray a negative view of Evangelicals as shallow fundamentalist, check-the-box Christian Nationalists. Everything in the book is about extremes. Natalie is not just educated; she goes to Harvard. She doesn’t just have a social media presence; she has millions of followers. She not only has children; she has at least a half dozen in two eras of her life. Not only does she marry (poorly) into money, but they are very wealthy and have political power.
I did not like the book for the first several chapters. I grew more interested as I realized we are invited to watch a woman who has it all together drift into mental illness. There is no joy in learning about mental illness, but the way Caro Claire Burke portrays what is happening to our narrator is rather clever. 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 a great job. Natilie wakes up in 1855, and the ranch life staged for Instagram suddenly becomes real. She “feels frozen in the pages of a children’s nursery rhyme.” At one stage of Natilie’s life, her mother says to her, “You think kindness is a side virtue. It’s not, it is the whole thing.” Good advice that comes too late.
At the end of the book (a bit of a spoiler alert), we see the march of her children toward a life Natalie never had, and the return of her college roommate for a final revenge.