Catherine Raynes: Yesteryear and True Crime

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke  

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. 
 
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. 
 
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. 

  

True Crime by Patricia Cornwell  

The jaw-dropping, moving memoir from the godmother of forensic crime and creator of Kay Scarpetta. 

 

LISTEN ABOVE 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks at.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Be time to get your book packted. This week he
wee again. Katherine Rains, our book reviewer, has her two
recommendations through as Calder Catherine Morning Jack. Let's begin with
the new book from Caro Claire Burke tell us about Yesteryear.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
So this is essentially a time travel novel set on
this very interesting premise. So you meet this woman, Natalie
Halla Mills, and she's this YouTuber. She's living this very
kind of perfect, seemingly perfect life as an influencer. She's
got eight million followers, and she's documenting her beautiful farm
life with her husband Caleb, and her five children with

(00:49):
a sixth on the way, and this very what's termed
trade life now and she's obsessed with being good and
likable and obedient and you know, morally right and ironically,
these traits are the things that are making her very miserable.
And you know, behind the scenes of this life, everything's
choreographed perfectly. There's nannies and farm hands and producers and everything,

(01:11):
you know, keeps her life in this perfect state. And
then one morning she wakes up and she just can't
work out quite what's going on. Things aren't quite right.
The house is not quite is her house but not
her house, and her husband, while familiar, is not quite
ham and her kids really aren't her kids, and she's
really confused, and she's actually appears that she's woken up

(01:32):
in the eighteen hundreds. And as the story progresses, you
hear about her life in her time now and what's
going on, and this life that she set up to
a scholarship to an elite college and she felt she
didn't fit in there, and her husband Caleb, who hasn't
turned out to be the man that she thought he
would be. And you get this novel telling you about
the sort of disparity between online personas and reality and

(01:55):
this cancel culture and social culture and modern America and
this influence and lifestyle, and it sharply focuses on this
sort of traditional fame and faith and social comment. And
it's really thought provoking and it's really interesting and not
what I expected at all, but is really really well done.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Okay, great, So that's Yesteryear by Caro clear Burke. You've
also read True Crime by Patricia Gornwall, So this is.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Patricia Cornwall's memoir, and she's most well known for her
Scarpetta series about this character pathologist doctor k Scarpetta, and
it somewhat mirrors her own life. And she goes right
back to her childhood, which was really traumatic. She was
raised by what you can only describe some pretty awful parents.

(02:41):
Her father left them on Christmas Day, her mother ends
up being and institutionalized twice. She ends up in this
foster family who were abusive, and then she develops this
really interesting kind of only really term it parental relationship
with the evangelist Billy Graham's wife Ruth, and then she
ends up in hospital. She has a near death car
accident and all of these obstacles in her life, and

(03:03):
you can really see where her drive in her in
Britian came from. And she ends up at one point
in her life in Merston law enforcement and forensic science,
and she becomes the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, and
you just this whole kind of you know, her life
kind of goes in one direction and then it flicks
into another. And this life that began in poverty, and
then she ends up spending time and the friendship of

(03:25):
politicians and celebrities and these redirections in her career path.
And she's had the most fascinating life and done all
sorts of things in her in her time. And you know,
there's parts of her story that are really difficult to read,
but she, yeah, really interesting, She's intriguing, and it's you know,
an autobiograph, autobiography that I feels a very candid reflection
of her life. But yeah, really interesting woman, well worth reading.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Okay, cool, So that is true crime. That's by Patricia Cornwell.
Catherine's first book is Yesteryear by Caro clear Burke. Those
titles and all the info unied is up at Newstalk
s HEB dot co dot nz.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to newstalks B from nine am on Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio