Yesteryear
Author: Caro Claire Burke
New York Times Bestseller, GMA Book Club Pick
Original Publication: 2026
Genre: Fiction, Satire
“The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.”
Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel is currently the talk of all book circles and, while I devoured it (as was widely suggested I would), I had mixed feelings as I set it down. The novel follows Natalie Heller Mills, a young woman utterly convinced of her own superiority. Not just any woman – an Evangelical woman. An aspiring tradwife, although she doesn’t start out knowing that word. If you’ve read other reviews of this book, you may be under the (somewhat correct) impression that the reason the book is so popular is that it’s a heaping helping of Schadenfreude for women who can’t stand the current tradwife trend. It’s a little that, to be sure.
(A “tradwife”, if you’re wondering, is a certain brand of female social media influencer who embraces hyper-traditional gender roles, positioning her husband as the head of the house and primary breadwinner, and herself as a domestic goddess. They often homeschool their kids. Never mind that it’s fake by its very nature – if the influencer is successful enough, they easily eclipse their husbands as the actual primary breadwinners.)
More broadly, however, in addition to being critical of the concept of social media influencers, it’s a takedown of the hypocrisy of the Evangelical movement, and how they misunderstand feminism, Christianity, and a host of other things. Natalie has a constant internal monologue, and it’s 99% angry and self-righteous, and 1% lip service to “The Lord.” She’ll sneer in her head that a woman who speaks to her in the grocery store is a [insert filthy word here for women – think British], then follow it up with a breezy “Sorry, Lord! But she is!” She’s 100% convinced that every single woman she meets is jealous of her. She’s 100% convinced that she’s smarter than everyone else, and treats everyone – including her kids and husband – with disdain. She alienates her family. She has the absolute cognitive dissonance to believe that she’s living this perfect, holy life. In short, Natalie Heller Mills is insufferable.
“I spread my arms out wide, gave a big twirl, then curtsied. I’d been working, lately, on being whimsical. From what I understood, this required saying things like whoopsie daisies, twirling around in prairie dresses, and throwing my head back and laughing hysterically at things that really weren’t that funny. “On behalf of the mountains and the chickens and cows and the kale and the kids,” I said grandly, “welcome to Yesteryear Ranch.””
When her rich, lazy husband turns out to be completely useless as a breadwinner, Natalie hatches a plan: They’ll buy a ranch in Idaho, because her husband has really only ever wanted to play cowboy (or be a Kindergarten teacher, which Natalie dubbed “as embarrassing as a flaccid penis”), and maybe he’ll get good enough at it that they’ll make enough money to get by. Unfortunately, his uselessness carries over to being a farmer (surprise, surprise), so Natalie decides she’s going to capitalize on the tradwife movement and make the money they need to survive by herself.
Natalie sets about popping out baby after baby, remodeling their house to be more of an old school farmhouse, and curating the perfect online personality. The problem is, it’s all phony, whether she admits it or not. When she hires her first nanny, she sighs dreamily, “now I’ll never have to be alone with my kids again!” She spends an inordinate amount of time in her own head, railing against what she has dubbed “The Angry Women”; that is to say, women who have left negative comments on her Instagram feed. In Natalie’s mind, they’re feminists, they hate men, they hate children, the REALLY hate themselves, and they’re seething with jealousy of her. Meanwhile, Natalie barely tolerates her own husband and children (they don’t seem all that keen on her, either), and hates everything about her circumstances. The trouble is, she’s made her bed, and her adherence to her religion will not permit her to escape or dare to do anything else with her life.
After an incident on the ranch, Natalie is thrown 175-odd years into the past onto her own farm, where she’s forced to actually be a traditional wife and mother and put her money where her mouth is. Will she learn to appreciate what she has? Or even survive?
Fun fact: The film rights for Yesteryear were sold to Amazon MGM Studios before being published. Anne Hathaway is set to both star in and produce the movie, and she is listed in the novel’s acknowledgements section.
Bother if: The concept is fantastic, and the ending was very satisfying. I had some quibbles with the execution and I think it could have used a sharper editing pass – quite a few not-quite-right words, and I kept coming across details that didn’t match from one chapter to the next. For example, one of her brothers-in-law’s name changes from when they’re first introduced. In one part, she mentions having graduated from Harvard, then later in the book says she dropped out after her first year when she got married. In an interview, she introduces herself as “mother of three with one on the way”, when chronologically at that time, she was a mother of two, with one on the way. It doesn’t necessarily detract from the story, but I think I’m possibly giving the writer too much credit if I chalk these up as 100% purposeful (i.e., if we’re excusing every mistake because Natalie is an obviously unreliable narrator.) Natalie also spends quite a bit of time performing being a “normal” human being, and we’re left to decide whether she’s on the autism spectrum, a pathological narcissist, or something else. Take your pick, I guess, for reasons why a grown woman needs to think about what face she’s making when people are talking to her and whether or not it’s an appropriate face for the occasion (meanwhile, she isn’t listening to them.) If it was simply intended to underscore how utterly phony she is, I thought it fell a little flat. Despite these observations, I did enjoy the book and have thought about it more than once since reading it.
Don’t Bother if: If you can’t see Natalie as a love-to-hate-her character (and you simply hate her), you’re probably just jealous that she’s such a perfect, holy woman and you’re such an unlovable troll. Just kidding. She’s not a likeable character. The concept and the storyline are good enough on their own that she doesn’t have to have any redeeming qualities to save the story, but if you’re not a fan of social commentary / satirical fiction, you might give this one a miss. There are also some very mild sex scenes, and the novel is critical of Evangelicals if you’re offended by either of those.
