Have you ever wanted to read a book about a woman’s life, but with the chapters arranged in an order that seems designed to make the otherwise ordinary process of reading slightly more difficult? If so, Yesteryear may be for you.

I’m being facetious, but only slightly. Yesteryear follows Natalie Heller Mills, a wildly successful tradwife influencer whose entire public persona is built on the fantasy of simpler times: domestic virtue, feminine obedience, curated motherhood, and a version of marriage that looks far more appealing at a distance than it would in practice. Then, one day, she wakes up in 1855 and is forced to live the life she has been selling to millions of women online, minus the ring light, the nanny, and presumably the ability to delete comments.

The book itself moves between three versions of Natalie’s life: the present she disappears from, the past she is transported into, and the memories of university, marriage, motherhood, and the various moments that shaped her into the woman she becomes. The book jumps between these timelines without much warning, meaning the first paragraph of almost every section is spent working out where we are, what year it is, which version of Natalie we are dealing with, and which of the ten or so possible children’s names is supposed to tell us that.

This structure might have worked if the book gained something from it, but it doesn’t. Fragmented timelines can create tension, deepen character, or mimic the way memory actually works. Here, though, it mostly creates friction. I didn’t feel disoriented in a clever way. I felt like I had been set homework before being allowed to read the chapter.

A lot of the more negative reviews I’ve seen begin by praising the premise before expressing disappointment in the execution. I’m not sure I can even fully give it that. The premise is certainly timely, and there is an obvious appeal in watching someone who has made a career out of romanticising female submission suddenly discover that the life she is selling is only attractive when heavily subsidised by modern medicine, domestic staff, wealth, and Wi-Fi. But the central irony is so immediately apparent that the book has very little room to surprise you. I had already reached the apparent conclusion by about 40 pages in.

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So for most of the novel I was reading in the hope that something else would happen. Maybe the message would twist. Maybe, at the very least, the plot would. Maybe Natalie had dreamed her future life as a tradwife influencer and her grim 1855 reality was the truth all along, which might not have deepened the message, but would at least have given the story some charge. Maybe it was a sequel to The Truman Show. Anything, really, that might have disturbed the very obvious shape of the story. Instead, by the time I was eighty percent through, I still wasn’t convinced the book had told me anything meaningfully different from what it had told me at the beginning.

The issue is that Yesteryear doesn’t really develop its central idea so much as keep proving it. Natalie sells a fantasy that collapses the moment she has to live it; the past is brutal rather than quaint; influencer culture rewards performance over sincerity; women can be both victims and participants in misogyny. These are all interesting ideas, but the book seems to arrive at them early and then spend the rest of its pages confirming them. It gestures towards social and political critique, but too often relies instead on Natalie’s next ordeal to create momentum.

Natalie herself is another issue. She is awful. She judges other women, resents her children, wants admiration constantly, and seems to interpret every flicker of jealousy as evidence that someone else has done something wrong. Her husband and father-in-law are not much subtler: men whose politics and entitlement are written so clearly on the page that they feel less like people around Natalie than explanatory notes attached to her worldview. The ugliness doesn’t really reveal anything new about her after a while. She starts to feel less like a person and more like a collection of bad opinions arranged into the shape of a woman. She is so obviously built to represent a certain kind of woman online that she never quite survives as an actual one.

And then the ending arrives. I won’t spoil it for the one or two of you who may still choose to read this, either out of curiosity or the same instinct that makes people press bruises, but I did not find it satisfying. It feels hurried and imposed, as though the book needed a final turn but had not quite earned one.

Rather than reframing what came before, the ending doesn’t really sharpen the book’s message, it simply confirms the bleakness already present throughout. It doesn’t reframe Natalie in a way that makes her more tragic, more frightening, or more human. It just makes her behaviour more extreme. By the end, I didn’t feel that I understood her any better, or that the book had revealed anything more interesting about the ideas it had spent so long circling.

The basic image of a tradwife influencer being forced to live the life she aestheticises is potentially funny, and potentially quite cutting. There is a novel in that idea that could have been brutal, strange, and genuinely incisive. But a concept is not the same thing as a novel, and Yesteryear never quite finds enough beneath its premise to become one.

For more regular reading updates, shorter thoughts, and proof that I buy books faster than I read them, follow me on Instagram @adamkhanco.