What if the tradwife fantasy you sold your followers turned out to be a curse, and the curse was 1855? That’s the deliciously mean premise of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear, a book that takes the internet’s romance with homesteading, sourdough, and “simpler times” and drags it, kicking and screaming, into the actual 19th century.
Natalie Heller Mills is a 32-year-old influencer who has built a life, and a considerable income, performing domestic simplicity for an adoring Instagram audience: the gingham dresses, the wood-fired stove, the carefully staged bread. Then she wakes up and the performance has become real. The gorgeous farmhouse is a drafty cabin with no plumbing and no electricity, the children in the house are recognizably hers and yet total strangers, and Natalie has to work out, fast, whether she has slipped through time, lost her mind, or stumbled into something in between. Burke uses that premise as a scalpel, cutting into the gap between the aesthetics of a hard life and the brutal reality of actually living one.
The novel’s greatest pleasure is its nerve: it is very funny in a way that never lets its narrator off the hook. Burke has an ear for the specific cadences of online performance, and watching that voice collide with 1855’s outhouses, childbirth, and backbreaking labor produces some wickedly satisfying comedy. But the book isn’t just a joke at Natalie’s expense. As the chapters accumulate, it becomes a surprisingly sharp interrogation of nostalgia itself, the way “simpler times” get marketed as a lifestyle brand by people who would not survive a week without a phone charger. The pacing is brisk, the prose propulsive, and the twist mechanics are handled with real control for a debut.
Critical response has been largely enthusiastic, with many reviewers calling it one of the most talked-about debuts of the year and praising its ability to be both a page-turning thriller and a cultural satire at once. A handful of critics have pushed back, arguing the novel sometimes struggles to separate its narrator’s convictions from its own point of view, and that the central conceit, however sharp, gets reasserted more than it evolves as the story goes on. Even those readers tend to agree the premise alone is worth the ride, and the book has already attracted major screen interest.
Yesteryear is a smart, wicked hook of a book: part morality tale, part fish-out-of-time thriller, and fully aware of exactly how ridiculous, and how seductive, the fantasy of a simpler past really is. Recommended for anyone who has ever side-eyed a suspiciously photogenic homestead account.
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