Summary of Yesteryear

Yesteryear by Caro Clare Burke was published in April 2026. It is the Good Morning America Book Club pick for that month and already has an adaptation in the works starring Anne Hathaway. I made a summary of Yesteryear to remind you of the plot, characters, and important moments in the book.

Yesteryear is a complex story that will make you think about social media, how we use it, and what is real vs the picture that is portrayed on screen. This Yesteryear summary is detailed and will have spoilers. If you are looking to read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke for your book club, I also have a list of Yesteryear book Club Questions.

Before you read the summary, please be aware that in addition to spoilers, there may be some content that is triggering. These include but are not limited to: child abuse and neglect, animal abuse, domestic abuse, mild drug use, alcoholism, and detailed descriptions of child birth and pregnancy. This is an unputdownable book that will lead to some fantastic book club discussions, but many serious topics are discussed in this book.

Quick Summary of Yesteryear

Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife who has millions of followers on social media. She shows her lifestyle of collecting eggs from the chickens (The Ladies) and preparing beautiful meals for her 6 children. She prides herself on living a faithful, antifeminist lifestyle.

So what if behind the scenes, she has multiple nannies, a producer, ranch hands, and more staff to help her life appear effortless. Natalie is convinced the haters are jealous.

When Natalie wakes up one morning in 1855 with children who look like hers, but are not the same, and a husband who is Caleb, but not her Caleb, she thinks it might be a sick prank. Until the realities of living without electricity finally hit her.

The book is told in multiple timelines: The present, the past, and Natalie’s time in school leading up to her influencer days. The story is complex and will make the reader question our society, the pressures on women, and our obsession with tradwives.

There are triggers in this book of domestic abuse, detailed descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth, sexual assault, child abuse/neglect, suicidal thoughts, and animal abuse.

Yesteryear Summary

Part 1: The Past

Natalie wakes up before her alarm. She is proud that everything is so easy for her. She always wakes up before her alarm. Caleb is milking their cow. He is one of five boys in a family of overachievers. His father is on his third presidential bid and is a current US Senator. Caleb is soft and spoiled. She refers to herself as a “flawless Christian woman”.

Natalie is pregnant with her 6th child. She is thanking god for her Instagram and YouTube accounts. She is amazed at how wonderful her life is. She makes excuses for why she never shows all the help she has on Instagram. She oddly only sees how alike all the kids are rather than what makes them unique.

Caleb and Natalie refer to “the angry women”. She will not show any of her children’s failings. Refers to her children as “little idiots”. Girls would “perform” on camera better than the boys. Natalie hates that Clemintine calls her mom instead of Mamma”.

Clemintine asks, “What is a tradwife?” She is aware that she feels wrong about having kids. Natalie admits that she has 6 burner accounts that she uses to comment on her own posts. Natalie is convinced it was one of the nannies who told Clementine.

There are intermittent questions from an interviewer. We do not know who. Natalie is making a show of calling the chickens “ladies”. When Caleb comes to say hi, Shannon stops filming their interaction, and Natalie is upset about it. It is good practice to perform in front of the kids.

The only game allowed in the house is Monopoly, per Doug. Amy and Louise, the nannies, are sitting on the couch with their phones. Natalie brings the girls to Target as a treat. She has the nannies make the dinner.

While in Target, Natalie bumps into an old friend, Vanessa. Vanessa is making comments about Natalie’s girls’ names. Natalie studied global religious history at Harvard. She is extremely intelligent, but she refers to the name Zoe as a “pick me” name. She thinks horrible names in her head.

Thinking terrible things about Shannon, too. Why? Natalie wants to film content to cut off Vanessa from posting about it. Clemintine tells her to stop filming.

Natalie gets an email from Shannon saying she is resigning. Doug has told Caleb that it is time for him to run for office. Doug and Natalie agreed on what needed to be done to take care of Shannon and Caleb in one move.

Natalie is upset that Caleb cheated on her. She is trying to manage the entire situation. She chooses not to tell Caleb that Shannon is quitting. Prays that Caleb will get a spine

Part 2: The Present

Natalie wakes up and thinks it’s darker and colder than usual. She wonders why the power is off and why the generator is not working. She realizes she is not in her bed. She knows it’s nearly six am. She does not know where she is. Her phone is not there. She hears children’s laughter. Everything feels different. It is her home, but not her home. There are no lights and a working fireplace. Four children are sitting by the fire. They all look like they could be her children, but are not.

Natalie equates being a mother to losing herself forever. A little girl calls her “mamma”. Natalie doesn’t know who they are and asks where she is. Height notches on the door say 1855. Natalie sees Caleb, but her doesnt look like her Caleb. She demands to be taken home. She tries to run away and falls. She spits on him. Caleb says, “A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way,” and her so hard she passes out.

When Natalie was younger, her mother told everyone that her husband was “no longer with us”. He had not died; he left the family. Natalie received a full scholarship to Harvard. Her mother is telling her to “be nice”. She wanted to go. She thought she would not have to make friends because everyone would admire her for her intellect.

When they bought Yesteryear, Natalie wanted to renovate it to look authentic. They hired the man who did not question her. She wants all modern appliances hidden.

Past: Face hurting. Everything is hurting, and there are no mirrors. The little girl named Maeve comes into the room. Caleb and Natalie had always loved that name. Trying to remember her last day back home. She remembers the email from Shannon. She wonders how old the little girl is. She looks 6 or 7 but speaks like a 4-year-old. Natalie suddenly remembers that she was pregnant and screams when she puts her hand on her stomach, and nothing is there.

The girls are making soap, and Natalie recalls when she started making soap.

While at school, Natalie’s roommate is Reena. They are “pregaming”. How did they all have connections to each other? Natalie realizes that her hair and clothes represent stupidity to them. Natalie is listening to Reena and a boy fooling around in the bed next to her. As soon as they were done, Natalie threw up. Reena later tells everyone that he pressured her.

Past: Natalie is scrutinizing everything in the house. The house is like a time machine version of her nice house. The bathroom is an outhouse. The stench is so bad, she nearly vomits.

Natalie’s mother calls her at college every Sunday at 7:00 and asks about who she is meeting. Natalie lies to her and tells her it is exactly as her mother pictures. Natalie listens to Reena and her friends and recoils at their ideas of being a feminist and modernity. Natalie wants a single room.

Natalie is arguing with the professor in class and saying that women are biologically better at housework. The professor was mad, but Natalie didn’t realize it. Reena and Natalie had a huge fight. Natalie tells all of Reena’s friends that she lied about the boy pressuring her. Reena punches her in the face, and Natalie gets a single room.

When Natalie is invited to a church group, she agrees to go.

Past: Natalie does not know the name of the girl cooking at the stove. Her name is Mary. A few months before Shannon quit, they had an ultrasound to find out they were having a baby. They agreed to name the baby Mary. Natalie cannot understand how this child is named Mary. How did they create this situation? Natalie Panics and runs away. She runs straight into a steel trap stuck around her ankle. Caleb springs the trap and carries her back to the house.

Maeve is crying while Natalie is yelling to get her an ambulance.

When Natalie first met Caleb, their relationship moved very slowly. They exchanged stories about their families. Natalie tells Caleb that she wanted to live on a farm and study theology after her kids were born. When she asks him what he wants, he says that her idea sounds nice. Caleb loved the idea of a farm. He says she can teach him everything she knows about farming. She knows nothing. Caleb is Rich and good-looking who likes her. By the third date, they talked about marriage. On their fourth date, they kissed.

Caleb’s mother sent Natalie a dress for their engagement party. He gave her a four-carat ring. She did what she was supposed to and told him it was too big. Interestingly, Natalie’s mother is religious and does not believe in divorce, but still thought that Natalie would have a career also. She is shocked that Natalie would agree to take a back seat to Caleb.

Past: Foot bandaged and elevated. She passed out watching Mary sew it up. Mary chastises her for not behaving like an adult. Mary makes dinner, and Natalie thinks it looks like shit. Natalie has a fever. Mary gives her something to help her. Sweet Maeve is in the bed with her.

At their wedding, Amelia tells Natalie that she is pregnant. She is twenty-one. Natalie just wants her to go away. They tried to fool around. Caleb is not hard, so it didn’t hurt. Natalie runs into Reena on campus. Reena is not doing well, and there are rumors about her. Natalie assumes that Reena thinks she is so gorgeous. She is pregnant with Clementine. She is scrutinizing all of Reena’s choices in her head. She is making up an entire life filled with problems for Reena. She tells Reena that she is leaving school when Caleb graduates and will finish online.

Clementine is born in August during a heatwave, and Natalie describes her as having “cold, black eyes”. Caleb thought Clementine was Natalie’s twin, and Natalie couldn’t see it. She describes Clementine’s gaze as malevolent. She cooed and cried in front of other people, pretending she thought the baby was perfect.

But when they are alone, she thinks to the baby, “Who are you?” Natalie is shocked by the realities of pregnancy and childbirth. Natalie does not want to go home. She thinks that the baby is evil. Her mother suggests that Natalie go for a run, two days post-partum. She goes out, rips her stitches, and starts bleeding. She tells her mother that she cannot do this, and her mother tells her she can because she has to.

Past: Mary tells her to get up. Her fever broke. She is having fever dreams and doesn’t know what is real. While she is finally out and out of bed, she finds plastic on the ground in the past- it’s a microphone. Is it really a microphone or is it just a pebble? The reader is unsure as to Natalie’s mental state. Natalie is having suicidal thoughts.

In the present, Natalie’s sister, Abigail, confides that she is overwhelmed with three babies in three years. She is trying to relate to Natalie and find some camaraderie. Natalie denies she’s having any trouble, despite the fact that she has showered once in ten days and won’t get out of bed.

After Clemintine is born, Natalie, the baby, and Caleb go to stay with her mother. Natalie realizes Caleb is dumb. He bought her presents (running shoes) and suggested she take her newborn baby on a run. 

Natalie is overwhelmed and furious at Caleb, who will not get a job, so she calls his mom. They get in the car and begin a 12-hour drive to California, half of it is in silence. Caleb mad Natalie called Amelia. Natalie wonders why she married Caleb when they finally arrive at his parents’ house, and he asks for a glass of milk.

Natalie is constantly talking about Clementine’s dark eyes. She has an ongoing dialogue in her head of horrible, mean thoughts. She does not think nice things about anyone, especially Caleb and Clementine.

Natalie has loved the idea of marrying into a big family, but she never got to know Caleb’s brothers. They all travel together, but Caleb and Natalie aren’t included. They have relationships with each other that do not include Caleb and Natalie. Only now does Natalie wonder why Caleb didn’t have a best man at the wedding

Past: Maeve and Mary do the cooking. Natalie does practically nothing in the house. She does remember how to make sourdough, but is shocked when it tastes disgusting. When Caleb brings the raw milk in from the barn, the bucket is covered in cow poop.

Natalie finally looks at her injury and is shocked by what her leg looks like. 

In the present, Natalie calls her mom to tell her that her husband is a baby. She is mad that he won’t try to find a job, and she finds him watching porn. Amelia and Doug are talking to Natalie, saying they thought marrying her would help him. He had messed up a business school interview, and they don’t know what to do with him. They said they could get him a job, but she has to make him do it

Past: Natalie is having a breakdown. She is also having intrusive thoughts about running away

In the present, Natalie is trying to fix Caleb’s resume to get him a job. She continues to have ideations about hitting the baby. Amelia is not help. She drowns all of her feelings with different drugs and alcohol. The monotony of the day is getting to Natalie.

Natalie calls her mom to ask how she handled Her mom said she always imagined she was being watched. She refers to the father‘s passing as if she believes it all these years later. Natalie decides to just get up every day and get herself together. Amelia thinks it’s because she took the “mother Little’s helper pill “ and offers to get her more, but Natalie refuses.

Past: Natalie is on house arrest. Mary is bossing her around while Natalie insists she doesn’t belong there.

In the present, Caleb wants to be a kindergarten teacher. Natalie does not want to be with someone who has so little ambition. She finds a property in Idaho that is an old cattle farm. She needs $5 million to buy the ranch and cover the first three years of operating costs. She asks Doug for the money and says it’s going to work. This is a long-term solution, so he can be a “man”. Doug says he will give her the money if she has more kids- “give my son a big American family.”

After they buy the farm, Caleb decides he doesn’t want any cattle on it and wants to choose the curriculum for the family. He will homeschool them.

Past: Natalie wakes up and realizes she hasn’t had a nightmare and asks for a shower. Maeve says to her, “You’re back”.

Natalie creates her Instagram account the day she signed the contract for the house, but points out that she only has 6 pictures from the first three years.

Picture 1:
Standing in front of the barn with a nearly one-year-old Clementine. Caleb bought her a phone and told her to get a social media account

 Picture 2:
A landscape picture of yesteryear . Bought the ranch. There was black mold, so another season was spent with Doug and Amelia while the mold was remediated. Clementine was weaned, learned to walk, and began talking. They ordered a dairy cow and chicks.

Picture 3:
Clemintine holding chicks with Caleb and a cow in the background. The chicks all died. The cow got mastitis and died. They decide they need to hire workers

Picture 4:
Caleb and Clementine at Doug’s election night party. He is a senator once again. Amelia OD’d and needed to be taken to the hospital.

Picture 5:
Caleb and Natalie are kissing. They had been trying to have another baby for two years. He has issues and can’t perform- always had the same issue. She gives him a bowl and tells him to “get it done”.

Picture 6:
Six months pregnant with her second child.

Past: Natalie is trying to make food and put on a show of being ok. Mary brings her tonic to help her sleep on the good days.

In the present, they have not made any money and the five million dollats is almost gone after 3 years. Amelia is going to rehab.

Abigail wants to divorce her husband, Bryce. Rather than supporting her, Natalie tells her that she can’t afford to get divorced. She tells her she will be a single mother of five on food stamps. Even though she knows that Bryce is mean, lazy, and hits her. Natalie is horrible.

Natalie cannot stand Caleb. In her prenup, Caleb owns the ranch. She would have nothing if she left him. She is clearly projecting onto her sister.

Past: Old Caleb announces he is sleeping in the bed tonight. Natalie keeps asking, “Why am I here?” “Who are you?”. There is a description of an interaction that is a trigger warning for rape.

Mom worried about Natalie worried because they were renovating a house with no money, etc. Caleb thought the produce was organic. It is not. Natalie told their hired workers to use pesticides and then hide them. Somebody saw. Natalie is just trying to make a profit.

Natalie tries to post a thirst trap after hundreds of pictures. This is the day she starts spending on herself.

Past: Natalie and Maeve are making caps for the ladies. Mary is acting like the parent and doing the chores. Natalie does not realize that Mary has been gone for hours. When she comes back, she is shaking but will not tell Natalie what is wrong. We find out later in the book why.

Natalie decides to take a social media course for $1500 from Tammy Lane. They are all Christian influencers, “divine Christian feminine.” Natalie is pregnant again. Tammy is doing something right. There are so many people in the course. In a breakout session, people tell her that something is “off” about her Instagram. People know that she is pretending. Her emotions came across as contrived. They told her to practice smiling in the mirror.

Abigail finally gets divorced after her fifth child, and Natalie is mad. She starts posting about “Our sweet little farm.” Doug is cutting their funds in half because running for president again. Natalie tells Clementine that she needs to learn how to smile.

Past: Mary is not getting up, sleeping in, and snapping at people. Mary walks out the door. Natalie thinks that the Lord is visiting her through Mary. She mentions Clementine, and Mary recoils.

Present: Reena was laid off from her job, and Natalie is embarrassed for her. She thinks how pathetic Reena is and realizes she is the same. They get their 5th and 6th dairy cow because they keep dying, and Caleb thinks that if he gets to at a time that will somehow keep them healthier. Caleb also buys a horse. Caleb calls for Natalie to come see the TV. There is a guy from one of Caleb‘s online forums talking about her. He is a white supremacist. Natalie’s Instagram account is increasing drastically, and she has gained 300k followers

Past: Able reaches 13th birthday and Caleb takes him to do something to mark the special day that he has become a man.

Present: Three months later, Natalie has one million followers. She is practicing cooking and realizes her followers want video content so she stays up all night learning how to film. She thinks that a good influencer doesn’t change herself- just the packaging. He taught her how to market herself. Natalie equates pigs searching for truffles to humans. She notes they both will search for the thing that is rotten and won’t stop. Her goal is to be lovable and unbearable- aka addicting.

Natalie thinks about “The Angry Women”. They all wanted what they didn’t have. It occurs to her that she does not have twine to make a meal, so she wakes up 6-month-old Clemintine to go to the store. There, she meets her first fan and handles it all wrong. She says weird things and chastises herself in her head. When she leaves the store, the woman realized she had left her six-month-old baby sleeping in the car when she went grocery shopping. The fan was horrified.  Natalie wishes she had admitted she was broken. She tries to justify it by saying she needed to take advantage of nap time.

Doug asks her to post about him on her Instagram, but she refuses.

Clementine is crying because she is hungry. Natalie’s constantly calling her daughter bitch in her head. Natalie doesn’t realize that it is 9:00 at night and she had not fed the kids. She had lost track of time. She tells Caleb that she needs a nanny to help. He refuses but says they can have a “babysitter”.

Past: Natalie used to fantasize about god the way other kids fantasize about boys. Enjoying sex with old Caleb. She realizes she hasn’t gotten her period since she was in the past. She thinks she is pregnant.

Present: they hire Nanny Louise, and Natalie has to think about “Being online Natalie in real life”. Louise comments about Caleb’s choice of educational curriculum for the children. She wonders if Natalie knows it is so ideologically driven. Natalie pretends like she knows and cares. Natalie insists on calling her “Nanny Louise” even though it was Louise’s preference to be called Louise. 

Abigail is dating a pastor at her new church. She is also seeing a therapist and is no longer following Natalie on Instagram.

Natalie was putting the money from their Instagram earnings into an account that Caleb didn’t have access to. He finds out and questions her about it. There’s no right answer. Caleb redirects the money to their joint account. Natalie knows he will just spend it because he is terrible with money and a terrible farmer.

Natalie meets Shannon, a new kind of woman who likes her account. Shannon talks about being in “The maze”, a.k.a. the rat race. Natalie is “working on being whimsical. From what I understood, this meant “… She hires Shannon, and when giving her the house tour, we learned that she has also hired Nanny Amy. When Natalie sees Jessa, she doesn’t recognize her and starts to give excuses for why. This is the first indication that there is something else going on with Natalie. When her daughter comes to hug her, Natalie describes it as “performing perfectly”.

Shannon agrees to take the job and move into the house. She didn’t know that she had to share a room or that Natalie had two nannies. She is also shocked that Natalie says to use DEET to protect herself from mosquitoes and bugs. Shannon thought that Natalie was against chemicals. Caleb starts reciting weird stats about rats in NYC, making people dumb. Shannon thought they did everything on their own. Did not realize they had workers.

Past: Old Caleb is with men who look familiar while she is trying to insulate the chicken coop.

Present: Natalie wants to fire Shannon. Her inner monologue talks about settling into the shape of online Natalie. She doesn’t fire her. They go through this every day- she wants to fire her, but doesn’t. There is a moment of filming with Clementine when she smiles. It is the first time she’s ever smiled, but she wasn’t smiling for her mom. She was smiling for Shannon.

Clementine does not know what an ocean is!

Natalie and Caleb’s fifth child, Junebug, is born at home.

Past: Who are the two men who keep coming to the farm to help old Caleb?

Present: Doug insists that a civil war is coming and is running his presidential campaign based on this platform. Shannon had complete control by that time. She could lock Natalie out of her Instagram and ruin her life. Shannon wants to know about Caleb’s forums

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Review of Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Yesteryear Summary: Almost at the End

Past: Men are working on the fence. Mary has a crush on the neighbors. They are the only people she ever sees other than her siblings. Natalie is asking where their farm is. She keeps asking, “Who are you really?” and insisting she has been kidnapped.

Present: Why is Shannon getting close with everyone on the ranch?

Past: All chickens were killed. Natalie decides to have a strike. She wants to escape. She’s afraid Mary will leave before she can.

Present: Caleb says he is leaving Natalie to move to New York with Shannon while she is 6 months pregnant. Natalie steps inside Shannon’s room to confront her. Shannon shares that she made a bet with herself to debunk the stupid things Caleb believes. Shannon does not care that she broke up the family, but Shannon says that Natalie does not actually have a home.

Natalie tried to snap at her – how does it feel to have sex with someone who is half hard, and Shannon’s response is “is he not hard when he is with you.”

Natalie is on top of Shannon, strangling her. When she realizes it, she lets go. Natalie tells Shannon to take a half-day off and meet her in the kitchen at 1:00. Natalie calls Doug to let him know that Caleb says he is in love with Shannon and there was “an altercation”.

Doug says that they need to arrange a promotion, bonus, or new contract for Shannon to head her off. They discuss what to do with Caleb. Can Caleb win an election? They need to get a PR firm. Natalie yells horrible things at Doug and only realizes after that it was not in her head. She realizes there is a very thin membrane between her horrible thoughts and what comes out of her mouth.

Past: Maeve is really sick. Natalie wants to leave, but won’t leave if Maeve is sick.

Present: Natalie is having a mental break, full of memories.

Past: there was only one trap. Mary tells her that there was only ever the one trap that she stepped into. Natalie decides to leave and not come back. She realizes she never tells her children that she loves them. There are markings to mark the path of the trails. She has memories of a house like this one, but nicer.

Present: Natalie tells Caleb that Shannon gave Clemintine a phone, tells her what a trad wife is….Clemintine has been watching her mother. Natalie confronts Clemintine about the phone.

Natalie sees comments about assault allegations in her Instagram feed and realizes that they needed a full legal team

Everyone sees Shannon giving an interview on a talk show. She suggests that Natalie, in addition to assaulting her, is a lesbian. Doug is in the middle of a presidential campaign.

TV interview emphasizing the age gap between 21-year-old Shannon and 35-year-old Caleb. Shannon discloses that all the cows are named Sassafrass. Shannon begins to describe the real world and has footage of all the terrible things Natalie says to her kids.

Natalie’s mom admits she lied about Natalie’s father. She was the one who cheated. She told him to leave, and they got a divorce. Her mother yells at her that she is so disappointed in how unkind Natalie is. That kindness is the only thing that matters. Natalie realizes that she meant to do a lot of things and did none of them.

Natalie spewing profanities!

Yesteryear Summary: Ending

*Be aware that the Yesteryear summary will have spoilers from this point onward in addition to potentially triggering content.

While sitting around and discussing the interview, they decide it would’ve been better if Caleb had raped Shannon, rather than for Natalie to be the perpetrator. Natalie refers to herself as us.

Past: Natalie walks until she finds a cabin. The cabin has pictures of her with Baby Stetson. There’s a radio playing, and a man, the neighbor, who is taking vegetables out of a bag from a grocery store, peeling off all the stickers, and putting them in a box.

Spoiler

When the neighbor sees her, he calls her Mama. The neighbors are Stetson and Samuel, her sons.

Present: Natalie takes three pills of Valium that had expired (Amelia gave them to her years ago). She tells Caleb that she is not queer, but that she would enjoy having sex if he could get hard. He tells her that he could get hard if having sex with her wasn’t like having sex with a dead body. She then tells him that Shannon would rather kill herself than go anywhere with him.

Caleb smacks her.

Doug wants to have her killed.

She tells Caleb to let her fix it.

Past: Natalie is lost in the woods when a woman pulls up in a car. She looks just like her.

Part 3

Spoiler

The woman in the car is Clementine, all grown up. Natalie cannot figure out how Clementine is in the past. Clementine is shocked when she arrives and asks, “So this is how you live?”

Natalie is on a talk show. They are asking her how it feels to have so many choices after living so sparsely. Natalie has all her thoughts of the past mixed with the present and cannot think straight. They want to talk about what happened after the lawsuit. Her social media became increasingly geared towards homesteading before she completely deleted her account. Doug had a failed presidential campaign.

Natalie was going to be charged with sexual assault, aggravated assault, child abuse, animal cruelty, wire fraud, and improper working conditions before Doug paid them off. She decided to become the thing she always said she was.

Spoiler

Mary is Natalie’s 6th child.

When Natalie thought she woke up in the past, it was actually ten years later. The baby she was pregnant with during the election campaign is Mary.

Caleb and Natalie made it a game. They said it was make-believe until they would no longer take the kids anywhere. She ordered pioneer reenactment outfits and tore out all the labels. When they sold their car, which was the last piece of modernity, Clementine took the kids for a walk and never came back.

The girls aren’t doing well, and the boys aren’t doing well either, but they are still close by. They have all been watching. Natalie and Caleb told Mary that everyone had died when Clementine and the other kids left.

She said that over the years, she began to believe the story that they were pioneer women. Natalie realized when she was pregnant that she could not stay there anymore. The last time with Maeve was terrible. She is pleading that she can’t keep this baby, and she needs to get an abortion. They are shocked that she would say such a thing. She is shocked to find out she is 50.

She’s not pregnant. She’s in menopause. Maeve has learning difficulties because she was born blue, and nobody could figure out what to do until Mary breathed into her mouth to resuscitate her.

Every day, when Caleb left to “work the fields”, he was really going to the little cabin in the woods where he sat and watched football and collected the food that the boys had bought from the grocery store.

Clemintine is shocked that Natalie doesn’t know any of this. Natalie thinks that this is what Caleb wanted all along. No one to judge him, and he could do whatever he wanted.

Clemintine has been in touch with Shannon all these years. Natalie wants to know if there was ever a civil war. Mary is so upset that everything her parents told her was a lie. Clementine had taken the kids and moved in with Natalie’s mom and Abigail. She is back with a warrant to collect all the kids. They had to wait until Doug’s money ran out before she could come to rescue them. She refuses to take her mother with her.

Clementine takes the kids to her car and says they will not see her for a long time- if ever. Natalie wonders how the last child she ever had was the first child she was able to love easily.

Animal control is coming to take the animals. Natalie looks at Caleb and tells him that she hates him and they should’ve had a divorce a long time ago. He agrees and says that he hates her as well. They take hands and walk away from their Homestead.

Five years later

Natalie is in ankle cuffs. Reena is there, the regional anchorwoman, who will be interviewing Natalie. She is still completely out of it. She doesn’t recognize her house. She tells Reena that she was always prettier than her; she clearly is completely out of touch with reality.

Natalie is serving a 30-year sentence for aggravated child abuse. Reena hands her The Book of Mary, her daughter’s memoir. The dedication page says: “For my mother.”

Natalie reads the prologue.

Mary tells the story of how she grew up, thinking everything was fine until her father told her that she needed to become the mother of the household because her own mother was filled with evil spirits. She did that until Clementine came to take her away.

Mary didn’t know how to read.

Yesteryear Character Guide

Main Characters

• Natalie Heller Mills- Main Character
• Caleb- Natalie’s husband
• Doug and Amelia (Caleb’s parents)
• Clementine- Natalie and Caleb’s oldest child
• Samuel- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Stetson- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Jessa- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• June bug- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Mary- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Maeve- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Able- Natalie and Caleb’s Child
• Noa- Natalie and Caleb’s Child

More Characters

• Eliza Heller- Natalie’s Mom
• Abigail- Natalie’s Sister, married to Bryce
• Reena- Natalie’s old roommate
• Sassafrass the cow
• Nanny Amy
• Nanny Louise
• Shannon- Natalie’s Instagram content producer

What to Read After Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Frequently Asked Questions

Epilogue

Did you like my summary of Yestertear? Will you choose Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke for your next book club?