Imagine waking up tomorrow to find the internet gone, your smartphone gone, and your carefully curated feed of soft linen dresses and homemade sourdough replaced by an actual, unglamorous 1855. That’s the premise driving “Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s sharp and unsettling debut, and it’s a premise that turns out to have a lot more on its mind than a fish-out-of-water gimmick.
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with millions of followers, the kind of online homemaker whose bread-baking videos and gingham aesthetic have made her a small industry unto herself. Then she wakes up, and she’s not performing pioneer life for an audience anymore, she’s living it, stripped of every modern convenience that made her lifestyle content possible in the first place. Burke never rushes to explain the mechanics of how or why; the novel is far more interested in what happens to a woman whose entire identity was built on romanticizing a past she’s never actually had to survive. Is it a nightmare, a delusion, a genuine slip in time? The book keeps that question at arm’s length long enough to let the more interesting question take over: what happens to the performance of femininity when there’s no camera left to perform for?
That’s where “Yesteryear” is at its best. Burke writes with a satirist’s eye for the absurdities of the tradwife aesthetic and the online culture that rewards it, but she doesn’t let Natalie off the hook as a simple punchline. The prose has real bite when it’s dissecting the gap between curated nostalgia and the physical brutality of the era Natalie claims to admire, and the novel’s best passages sit in that discomfort rather than resolving it neatly. It’s a book about faith, tradition, and fame all tangled together, and Burke is clearly more interested in unpacking that tangle than in handing readers a tidy moral.
Reception has been enthusiastic, if not entirely uniform. Several reviewers have praised the novel’s premise and its willingness to skewer a very of-the-moment strain of online performance, calling it a clever and unsparing look at the “grand performance of womanhood.” Others have noted that Burke packs enough ideas into these pages, questions of faith, feminism, celebrity, survival, that not every thread gets the space it deserves, and the ending in particular has divided readers over whether it earns its own ambition. That said, even the more mixed responses tend to agree the book is hard to put down once it gets its hooks in, and it’s already generated enough buzz to land a film adaptation in the works.
Whether or not every idea in “Yesteryear” fully lands, the novel succeeds at the thing that matters most for a book like this: it makes you look twice at your own feed. Natalie’s reckoning with a version of “simple living” that offers no exit and no ring light is uncomfortable in exactly the way good satire should be. Readers who enjoy fiction that turns a very current cultural obsession inside out will find plenty to chew on here, messy ending and all.
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