Somewhere between the sourdough starters and the linen aprons of the tradwife internet, there is a woman performing a life she does not actually live. Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel “Yesteryear” takes that performance and traps its heroine inside it, literally, and the result is one of the more purely entertaining thrillers of the year.
Natalie Heller Mills is a “tradwife” influencer with millions of followers, famous for her pioneer aesthetic on a ranch in Idaho: hand-churned butter, homemade jam, a life that looks, on a phone screen, like a return to something simpler and truer. In reality it is an elaborate production, complete with nannies and a crew, and Natalie is as much CEO as homesteader. Then, waking up one ordinary morning, she finds the crew gone, the electricity gone, the century gone. She is somehow living, for real, in the nineteenth-century version of the life she has been faking for her followers, with a wood fire that will not behave, children who are dirty and strange, and laundry that has to be hauled and beaten by hand until her fingers split. When a brutal injury in the woods makes clear how little margin for error this “beautiful life” actually has, Natalie has to find a way out of the exact fantasy she built her career on.
Burke’s satire lands because it never lets the premise become a gimmick. The novel is genuinely funny in its early chapters, skewering the aesthetics and economics of curated authenticity with real precision, and then tightens, chapter by chapter, into something closer to survival horror as Natalie’s polished narrative collides with the actual, unglamorous violence of pioneer life. The prose moves quickly, the chapters are short, and the book has the pacing of a thriller even when it is doing the work of cultural criticism, which is a difficult balance to strike and one Burke manages with more control than a debut usually allows.
Early critical response has centered on exactly that combination: reviewers have called it both a gimlet-eyed dissection of the “trad” movement and a legitimately twisty piece of suspense fiction, praising its willingness to be nasty about the performance of womanhood without losing sight of Natalie as a person rather than just a target. Some have noted that the satire occasionally outruns the character work, that Natalie’s transformation from influencer to survivor happens a shade faster than the emotional groundwork fully supports, but even those readers have tended to forgive it given how propulsive the back half becomes. The novel’s selection for a major on-air book club, and the reported film adaptation already taking shape, suggest an audience is finding it regardless.
“Yesteryear” works because it refuses to let its reader off the hook the way it refuses to let Natalie off hers: the fantasy of the simple life turns out to be exactly as unforgiving as the real thing, and the book delights in making both Natalie and the reader feel that discomfort. It is sharp, fast, occasionally very funny, and considerably darker than its pastel book cover suggests. For anyone who has ever paused mid-scroll on a homestead influencer’s feed and wondered what the rest of that day actually looked like, this is the answer, dramatized and turned up to a boil.
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