Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke [Book Review]

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is the most unique thing you will read all year… maybe in the last decade. Read my review and find out why I gave the debut novel 5/5 stars.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke came out earlier this year, and I’d been seeing it around enough that I finally picked it up. It’s a debut novel, which you’d never guess from how confident it is. The premise is a satirical time-slip thing — tradwife influencer wakes up in the actual version of the life she performs online — and it’s exactly as sharp as that sounds.

What is the book about?

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.

My thoughts

I loved Yesteryear. Full stop.

The setup is wild. Natalie is basically peak tradwife influencer. Perfect farmhouse, perfect kids, perfect life that just so happens to have a full staff, including farmhands and nannies, not to mention the industrial appliances and chemical-filled cleaners hiding off camera. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she wakes up in a version of that life where nothing is curated, and everything is work. Real, hard work.

It’s sharp, uncomfortable, and actually funny, which is so tricky to pull off. The satire is strong, digging into the whole performance of femininity thing, what women are told to want, and how that shifts depending on the time period, but also… doesn’t.

I read a lot, so when something feels this unique, I notice. And Yesteryear was like nothing I’ve read before.

Also, for a debut, Caro Claire Burke really went for it—I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I’ll be recommending this to basically everyone.

(Sounds like Yesteryear is already being adapted for a movie starring Anne Hathaway as Natalie!)

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

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