Yesteryear

[Passwordsaremynemesis]

Is anyone reading Yesteryear? I have just finished and need to talk about it. I loved it and did not see the ‘twist’ coming at all!

I’ve no idea Elle! Like you I feel like it’s fairly obvious where she stands. The protagonist is still one of my favourites from the books I’ve read this year even if everyone hates her 😆

I agree. Boring

The “twist” was fairly obvious, but I still enjoyed the story. I just think the last third was rushed.

I finally finished it last night, took me about a month to read it as I found it quite a slog.

I was very underwhelmed and once again annoyed at myself for falling for the hype, I really must stop doing that 😆! Luckily I managed to get the ebook via my library so at least it didn't cost me anything.

It was good to read something where pretty much every character wasn't likeable as that is quite unusual, although I did like her school friend nemesis and hoped she went on to be super happy and successful.

I didn’t see Caleb and Natalie as totally unlikable. I kind of thought of them as victims of their upbringing.

I downloaded it on audible to garden with the other day.

Its pretty crap so far. I'm just in the past.

I have just read this for book club and defo need to discuss it but no idea where to even start!

It was a very different experience to other books I've read. I didn't especially like any of the characters, but the character of Natalie felt believable even though she was a strange caricature and seemed almost like an exaggerated version of the truth of someone like this. None of the other characters really made much sense to me at all.

OTOH I couldn't stop reading it and kept wanting to go back and find out more. I don't usually get that unless I really get into a character. I think it was the way that Natalie did seem real to me. I was really intrigued by her split kind of self between "online Natalie" and the real her. That was actually a bit uncomfortable because I recognised aspects of it in myself. I hope I'm nothing like her IRL but maybe there are bits of it which ring true? That was quite horrifying and perhaps is what kept me glued to it.

The twist didn't make a lot of sense. I kept thinking she was experiencing some kind of psychosis and actually she was living in her actual, modern day house with her real husband and children but she was hallucinating the rest. The missing 15 years didn't make sense - she woke up one day surprised, confused and terrified to be there, with no knowledge of how to live during that time period, but during the same timeline she had memories of Maeve's birth - was this supposed to be indicative of her skewed mental state ie sometimes she was blocking out the decision she'd made and sometimes she wasn't?

And I don't really understand the rationale of why they decided to do that as a response to the scandal either. I get that it was meant to be a sort of punishment, but that felt like a really odd choice almost like it was just like "Lol, religious people are crazy and illogical!"

But I did enjoy the experience of the book. I don't mind narratives which switch back and forth using flashback like this but I probably would read it through again to get more of a sense of what order everything happened in.

It was ok. For me the flaws were around the first experiences in the “olden days” like the leg injury and how / who deals with it. It was just too extreme for me to believe. A bit like Stephen kings misery.
and why was her bread turning out so awful, was someone sabotaging it?

I did wonder why she didn’t see planes going over. She did mention “chem trails” at one point (which did kind of give away the twist)

I completely agree with this point, about the bread. I feel like the author had a few you ideas of where the story would end; a reality tv show, something like the Truman show, and then the ending it did have.

I read it as it was billed as the next biggest thing, but I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like the characters. It was reparative. I’ve told everyone to give it a swerve.

I could not get a handle on Natalie. Who was she? What made her like that? Was she ND? Or just affected by being raised in a cult-like religion? She was obviously unlikeable, so how did she manage to attract Caleb who, presumably, would have his pick of barbies given he's rich and stupid.

If they are making a film out of it I would love to see the later chapters totally from the perspective of her daughter, Clementine, who is the only likeable character in the book.

See I thought Caleb was under pressure to marry the right sort of girl. Religious and clever.

I assumed that the bread being awful was due to Natalie being used to cooking in a modern temperature-controlled oven, not a wood fired stove woth more variable temperature. Plus she was taking those ‘tonics’ which seemed to be used to sedate/ drug her, so couldn't do things properly.

But she wasn't used to that if she had been living in the "past" for 15 years. You'd be terrible at things at first and then you'd get used to it. She must have made bread the "old way" for much longer than she'd made it with modern conveniences, so her muscle memory ought to have been there.

You might have moments of shock at things like the state laundry left your hands in. I don't know, maybe it was an effect of the medication or something but it didn't make sense once you knew that information.

It does almost sound like the bulk of the story was written before the author knew why Natalie was in the past.