The Mathematical Inverse of the Truth
how Yesteryear turned child abuse and the law upside down
Five weeks ago I published a review of Yesteryear called “Yesteryear Is Not A Novel.” It’s been read close to thirty thousand times, which for me is enough to crack my top ten (and my top five if it keeps growing). And it keeps getting linked as the publicity machine grinds into higher gear — the Good Morning America anointing, the bestseller list, the Anne Hathaway adaptation, the entire laundered apparatus that takes contempt for a target the buyers already disliked and returns it to them as a beach read with a film deal stapled to the back.
That review is safe to read if you’re avoiding spoilers. This one is not.
If you think there’s even the slightest chance you’ll eventually read the book or watch the adaptation, turn back now.
And if graphic discussion of — and furious anger about — child abuse, and the privileged elites so insulated from reality that they make light of it to decorate their thinly researched novels, is going to upset you? Bye.
No hard feelings — frankly, I’d leave too.
By the way: anti-Woke culture warriors should be sending Caro Claire Burke a fruit basket. If the adaptation doesn’t fix the problems, it will hand the right an entire election cycle’s worth of material, gift-wrapped. “This is what the left thinks of your mother, your wife, your daughter” is all the voice-over has to say.
I’m not being cynical. I’m a data scientist, and that’s just where the numbers point.
Most people agreed with the part of the argument I actually cared about: that Natalie isn’t a person, that she’s been assembled scene by scene out of whatever reaction each moment seemed to call for, that Burke stopped researching the day she started writing and it shows in every theologically and denominationally illiterate line.
The only real disagreement I’ve seen comes from a particular tribe running a particular play. They’re arguing that all the lazy plot holes and flagrantly wrong details were intentional, akchually, and that those of us pointing them out are stupid, incapable of “critical reading and thinking,” and otherwise wallowing in some kind of performative despair that the genius of this book has been so badly missed by so many.
I believe these defenses to be done in bad faith. I get the impulse; I’ve defended people I perceived as being on my team out of pure loyalty more than a few times. But I don’t do it dishonestly, and one of the reasons I read Yesteryear‘s defenders as dishonest is that not one of them appears to know what they’re talking about.
I have yet to see a single defense of this book from someone who grew up in the evangelical world. I am perfectly willing to believe I missed something — even something important and obvious. But if I did, that’s at least partly on the author.
Look, I have a fairly high IQ. It has never once helped me parallel park, assemble a bookshelf without one triumphant leftover screw, or understand how to navigate group dynamics without a lot of awkward, inappropriate laughter.
But it works fine on novels, of which I read an unwholesome number, and I know this particular source material the way you only can if you were raised inside it.
So if there are super-sophisticated literary devices here that sailed clean over my head — well, that sits awkwardly next to the claim that this is a beach read, doesn’t it?
You can be a sophisticated meta-novel operating on multiple layers, or you can be a beach read by an author who told Kirkus, in her own words, “Once I started writing, I stopped researching.”
You can’t be both.
There are plenty of other angles of attack — Helen Roy handles the political side better than I would have here — but I’m going to zero in on the one I’m actually angry about, the one I left out the first time.
Because there is a worse problem than the hollow protagonist.
It is worse because its moral scaffolding holds up the whole book — pull it and the entire moral architecture comes down — and it is the single most fatuous thing I have watched a celebrated, prize-decorated, soon-to-be-major-motion-picture novel do in years.
Not the most offensive. Not the most poorly written.
The most fatuous — that specific, glittering, self-satisfied stupidity that only a very lucky person can afford, the kind of wrong you can only be if you have never once in your life had to know anything at all about the thing you are confidently making up.
The Fatuousness, It Burns
Natalie is convicted of four counts of aggravated child abuse — plus, in the book’s own carefully unspecified phrasing, “other lesser charges” — and sentenced to thirty years.
Sit with that number. Thirty years. I’m going to come back to where Burke got it, because she didn’t pull it out of the air, and she sure as hell didn’t pull it out of Idaho.
But first I have to clear away the thing you are already doing, right now, in your head, to make thirty years feel earned. I can see you doing it. You’re picturing starving children.
Stop. They are not starving. And here is the part that should end that particular line of defense before it starts: the book knows they are not.
Burke tells us, in her own pages, how the family eats. They hunt. They fish. They run a trapline. And when the traps come up empty and the fish aren’t biting, the two oldest sons — Samuel and Stetson, grown and gone for years — quietly run groceries out to the ranch: vegetables, fruit, and, in one of the few concrete details Burke commits to, “big frozen hunks of grocery store butcher’s meat.” There is a freezer. There is a supply chain. There are adult children secretly provisioning their younger siblings. The kids eat.
The author put that on the page herself, presumably without noticing that she was dismantling her own crime scene while decorating it.
So let me say the thing the book needs you not to think about. A child being fed by someone other than a parent is not a crime. It is not even unusual. In this country it is closer to the rule than the exception, and we are all fine with it until the moment a novelist needs us not to be.
Right now, today, an enormous share of American children eat their most reliable meal of the day in a school cafeteria. In plenty of districts, most (often, almost all) of the kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — and breakfast, and a bag of food sent home on Friday so they make it through the weekend.
There are grandparents all over this country who quietly keep a pantry stocked because they know their grandkids’ parents can’t, or won’t, or are barely holding on. There are churches running backpack programs precisely because the alternative is a hungry kid on Monday morning.
We do not prosecute a single one of those parents. We do not call it abuse. We call it, when we’re feeling honest, the way a lot of families actually survive — and when we’re feeling generous, community.
It takes a village to keep a child fed. We say that approvingly. We put it on tote bags. We mean it right up until the village turns out to be two odd brothers and a chest freezer full of grocery-store beef — and then, apparently, it curdles into four counts of aggravated child abuse and three decades in a cell.
The Mills children’s life was hard. I’m not going to pretend a trapline and a smuggled freezer add up to an easy childhood, and I’m not interested in romanticizing it. Hard is real. Hard is sad. But hard is not the same as starved, and starved is not the same as a crime, and fed-by-somebody-other-than-Mom is not a crime in any courtroom in America — not in Idaho, and not anywhere else.
Burke needed the children to be victims of deprivation. So she gave them a freezer full of meat and hoped you wouldn’t read closely.
I read closely. It’s the one thing my otherwise useless high IQ is actually good for. Close reading and calculus problems.
Fine, you say. Forget the food. What about keeping them out there — hidden, off the grid, cut off from the world, told their own siblings were dead? Isn't that the abuse?
And here is where I have to break the bad news about American law, which is that none of that is a crime either. Keeping your kids on your own property is not false imprisonment; a parent has the legal authority to say where their children go, and it takes actual restraint or coercion — a child locked in, tied down, physically prevented from leaving — to turn confinement into a chargeable offense.
The Mills kids weren't shackled. They stayed because they'd been raised to believe there was nowhere to go. That's the difference between the Turpins, who got life because their thirteen children were literally padlocked to furniture, and a family that simply never left the ranch. One is a torture case. The other is a lifestyle, and lifestyles — however bleak, however isolating — are not indictments.
And the lying? The fabricated 1855, the dead-siblings story, the whole counterfeit century?
I grew up being taught the earth was six thousand years old. There are children in this country right now being raised to believe it’s flat, that dinosaurs cohabited with Adam, that the Civil War was about states’ rights and the wife has no right to say no to sex because she submits to the husband as unto the Lord.
Filling a child’s head with nonsense is not a crime in the United States, and thank God, because if it were we’d have to build a prison the size of Texas and start with half the Sunday schools in it.
You are allowed to lie to your kids. You are allowed to raise them strange. The Constitution is annoyingly firm on this.
So strip it all away — the isolation, the lies, the bonnets, the freezer — and look at what physical violence the book actually puts on the page. There’s exactly one source of it, and it isn’t aimed at a child. It’s Caleb: knocking Natalie unconscious when she tries to flee, putting her on house arrest, running her down in the woods. Every act of real force in this novel is a husband’s, committed against his wife. Which is its own crime, a serious one — but it is his, against her, and you cannot stack a man’s assaults on an adult woman onto that woman’s own conviction for abusing the children.
The one violent criminal in the book walks off the page uncharged, and the author hangs his wife.
The Perils of Shittier-Than-You-Realized Research
So where did thirty years and four counts of aggravated child abuse come from? Not from the facts of the book. From a real woman.
In 2024, Ruby Franke — the Mormon family-vlogger who became the thing she pretended to document — pleaded guilty in Utah to four counts of aggravated child abuse and was sentenced to up to thirty years. Four counts. Thirty years. The same charge, the same number Burke hands Natalie.
But here’s what bought Franke that sentence: she starved her children, bound them, denied them water, made one of them do hard labor in the summer heat, and treated open wounds with cayenne pepper and honey. A prosecutor described the home as a concentration-camp-like setting. That is what four counts of aggravated child abuse and thirty years looks like when a court actually means it.
Burke took the charge sheet and the number off a torture case and stapled them to a woman whose kids were fed grocery-store beef out of a freezer. She didn’t research a sentence. She borrowed one — from the most sensational child-abuse case in the news while she was writing — because it felt like justice, and feeling like justice was as far as the inquiry went.
Now. Let’s talk about where Burke set her book.
She set it in Idaho.
I want to be fair to her for one sentence, because it’s the only sentence she’s earned: setting it in Idaho was, on its face, a reasonable instinct. Idaho is where the real off-grid, fundamentalist, hide-from-the-modern-world families actually are. If you wanted verisimilitude, you’d point at Idaho too.
But then, you’re not lazy, so you’d actually, you know, do some homework.
The problem is that Idaho is the single worst state in America she could have chosen for her ending to be possible — and she would have known that if she’d spent one afternoon, one, finding out how the place she’d chosen actually treats parents like the ones she invented.
Because in the real Idaho, parents like Natalie and Caleb don’t get thirty years.
They don’t get four counts.
In the real Idaho, the conduct at the center of this book — religiously motivated refusal of medical care, including the unattended birth that left Maeve oxygen-deprived — is exactly and precisely what the state's faith-healing exemptions were built to shield. Idaho started carving that protection into its child-welfare law in 1972, and has guarded it ever since.
Over the bodies, by the way, of a lot of dead children.
Real Fundie Kids of Idaho
Here is how Idaho actually works. Two statutes are supposed to protect kids: §18-401, which requires parents to provide food, shelter, and medical care, and §18-1501, which makes it a crime to endanger a child's health. Starting in 1972, the legislature carved religious exemptions into Idaho's child-protection law. The mechanism is narrow and specific: treating a child by prayer alone, in accordance with religious belief, cannot by itself be the basis for a neglect or endangerment finding. The documented result is not narrow at all. Idaho is one of only a handful of states that shields faith-healing parents from felony charges like manslaughter even when a treatable illness kills their child.
And this isn't a loophole that sits there unused. It is a body count. In one three-year stretch, at least twelve children died at the hands of faith-healing parents in Idaho, and not a single charge was filed — the state does not investigate or prosecute these deaths. Statewide, advocates claim approximately two hundred dead children since the 1970s.
Whatever the statute technically says on its face, that is what it does in the world: parents pray, children die, and no one is incarcerated.
No one is even charged.
Here's how Burke described her homework, to Kirkus, before any of this: she spoke to some Mormon and evangelical women for "a baseline understanding," then deliberately kept Natalie's faith vague — "It's meant to be a little vague."
A baseline. Kept vague on purpose.
For a novel whose entire fucking climax (no pun intended) turns on whether a specific religious motive triggers a specific religious exemption in a specific state.
The vagueness wasn't an oversight. She chose it, and told a reporter she chose it.
Now recall what Natalie says when her grown daughter finally walks back into that house and asks her father why he’s still there. Natalie answers — and it’s Natalie, the convicted woman, who answers a question that wasn’t even put to her: “We were trying to be good Christians. We really were.”
That line is meant to read as a monster’s mask slipping. To anyone who grew up how I grew up, it reads as the most ordinary sentence a homesteading father’s wife could possibly say.
But set the ear aside and look at it as a lawyer would: Natalie has just put the family’s motive on the record, in her own mouth, and the motive is religious. She has testified herself right straight directly into the loving libertarian arms of the §18-1501 exemption.
The unattended birth that left Maeve oxygen-deprived — “my husband is not a midwife, and I am not a doctor” — is not the prosecution’s smoking gun. In Idaho it is, again, exactly and precisely the religiously motivated medical refusal the exemption was written to protect.
Burke built her climactic crime out of the one act her chosen state specifically decriminalized half a century ago.
Across the line in Oregon — same church, same theology, the Followers of Christ — they only started getting convictions after repealing their religious defense in 1999, expanded in 2011, and even then the sentences were a joke relative to thirty years: an Oregon couple whose son died of an untreated condition faced guideline sentences of sixteen to eighteen months, because neither had a prior. Same conduct, same God, different side of a state line. The only variable is the law — which is the entire point.
It gets worse for Burke when you look at what real sentences for dead children actually run. A Virginia mother whose son died of malnutrition got five and a half years.
Then there's the closest thing reality offers to Burke's own premise. On the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, a seven-year-old girl was kept home, kept isolated, and kept out of the school that would have fed her, until she died on Christmas Day 2022 — skeletal, at the same weight she'd been nearly three years earlier, of starvation and an infection that set in through lice no one ever treated.
And here's the detail that ends the poverty defense before it can start: there was no poverty. Food, medical care, even a ride to the doctor were all free on the reservation, and the household was drawing nutritional and cash assistance the entire time.
The adults simply chose, day after day, to let her starve. That is Burke's scenario with the fiction peeled away — the hidden child, the withheld care, the deliberate walling-off from a world that would have stepped in — except this one actually died of it. The two people responsible got fifteen months and five years.
And the five only reached five because the judge varied upward from the sentencing guidelines, pushing past the recommended range because the neglect was so total. Even straining to be harsh, for a real, skeletal, dead little girl, the system topped out at five years.
The cases that actually reach thirty years are homicides: a corpse, plus a murder conviction, plus active violence.
Natalie has none of those. Maeve lived. All six children lived.
Burke gave a woman whose children survived a longer sentence than this country hands most parents whose children are literally dead, buried, and rotting in the ground.
So pick a lane, because the book can’t have both. Either the “good Christians” line is sincere — in which case Natalie is a religiously motivated parent in Idaho, and the exemption that has kept two hundred dead children’s parents out of a courtroom covers her too, and she walks.
Or it isn’t sincere, in which case the whole “I forgot I built it” architecture means she was mentally ill — and mental illness is mitigation, the thing that sends a defendant to treatment, not the thing that earns her the maximum a torturer got.
Religious motive shields her. Delusion downgrades her.
There is no door in that room marked thirty years.
Burke just needed one to exist, so she drew it on the wall and walked her readers into it.
The Ugliness of Actual Appropriation
Child abuse is a topic on which I still have wounds that aren’t healed, and I’m not pretending otherwise. That is largely why the fatuousness of Yesteryear enraged me so — because I take it very personally.
I, along with millions of other Americans whose childhoods warranted an adult being incarcerated but who lacked the foresight to, you know, hide cameras around the house at age four — we know how hard it is to get adults to even believe that child abuse happens, much less to step in and protect kids.
And actually prosecuting the abusers, as if kids were, you know, people?
Good fuckin’ luck with that one.
That is the part Burke will never feel in her body, and it is the part that makes Yesteryear not just lazy but obscene. The book is built on a fantasy — that the system sees, that it believes, that it comes with a warrant and a thirty-year sentence and makes the bad mother pay.
For Natalie, the cavalry arrives. The case gets built. The conviction sticks.
Justice, swift and total, rides up the dirt road.
For the rest of us, the cavalry was a no-show. We told a teacher who nodded and did nothing. We told a relative who decided it wasn’t their business. We grew up and watched the people who hurt us retire comfortably, get praised at church, die mourned.
The real number for what was done to a lot of us isn’t thirty years.
It’s zero.
It’s a casserole at the funeral and a nice word from the pastor.
We were the kids raised believing nonsense, left to find out what was true on our own, usually through humiliation. I was sixteen when I learned why there are sometimes two forks on a table and eighteen when I checked a children’s book on evolution — the first of many children’s books it would take to get me ready for college — out of the library.
So when a writer who plainly never lived within a thousand miles of this borrows the aesthetic of our childhoods — and then borrows a real torturer’s charge sheet, and then sets the whole thing in the one state that has spent fifty goddamn years and two hundred small coffins making sure parents like these are never touched, and serves it up as catharsis — that isn’t telling our story.
It’s wearing it. It’s appropriation in the ugliest sense: taking the suffering, discarding the truth, and keeping the parts that photograph well for the Anne Hathaway adaptation.
The cruelty of real child abuse is not the lurid part. It’s the indifference around it — the adults who could have acted and didn’t, the laws written to look away. A novelist with any actual contact with this subject would know that the horror isn’t that the system is too harsh.
It’s that, for children, it has almost never been harsh enough.
Burke got the one thing exactly, perfectly backward — in choosing Idaho she wrote the mathematical inverse of the truth — and a country that mostly hasn't lived it applauded, because the lie is so much more comfortable than the fact.
That’s the fatuousness.
Not that she got a statute wrong. That she was lucky enough, sheltered enough, cushioned enough, to believe the comforting lie in the first place — and to never once feel the need to check.
I checked. I didn’t have to look it up. I already knew.
For every kid the cavalry didn't come for: you survived the part this book pretends doesn't happen. Nobody believed you. Nobody got charged. Nobody rode up the road. You got out anyway, somehow, and that wasn't the system working — that was you.
It counts for more than any sentence a novelist ever invented.
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