I put a hold on this at my library before it was out. That doesn’t usually work in my favour. This time it did, and I had it within the first couple of weeks of release.
I read it on a plane. By the time we landed, I wanted to talk about it with everyone.
Yesteryear is Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, and it announces itself loudly. The premise: Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer with eight million followers, a ranch in Idaho, a cowboy husband, six children, and a kitchen full of professional appliances hidden behind rustic cabinetry. The farm-fresh eggs and sourdough starters are real. The nannies and the production team are less discussed. One morning she wakes up in 1855, and the performance she’s been selling her audience suddenly has no backstage.
The premise is exactly as it sounds. Natalie has spent years building an empire from a life she doesn’t actually live: the nannies, the production team, the 21-year-old social media manager named Shannon documenting every moment of her “pioneer lifestyle.” Her husband Caleb, the handsome cowboy in every post, is the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy, which is to say he is wealthy and not much else. Not talented. Not competent. Not particularly engaged. He’s a man who looks good on camera and outsourced the actual labour to his wife while she convinced herself, and eight million followers, that this was the life she’d always wanted.
Strip away the production value and that is the question Yesteryear is actually asking. If the dream you’ve been selling is real, if the values are genuine, if this is truly what you believe a woman’s life should look like, then what happens when the kitchen is actually warmed by a fire and the husband is actually a farmer and nobody is watching? The 1855 sections are not satire for satire’s sake. They’re a direct test of the premise. And the answer, delivered without much mercy, is that Natalie hates it. She has always hated it. She just hadn’t been forced to find out until the cameras were gone.
Burke is co-host of the Diabolical Lies podcast, and you can feel the political and cultural attentiveness in every page. This isn’t a book that’s simply poking fun at Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith, though the references are unmistakable. It’s asking something more uncomfortable: what happens to a woman who builds her entire identity on a life she has engineered for consumption, when the machinery behind her is stripped away?
I’ve been fascinated by those accounts in the way you watch a car accident, that specific combination of alarm and inability to look away. The production behind them is the thing that gets me. The nannies, the camera operators, the PR management, the careful curation of what looks effortless. And the women watching at home, often exhausted and under-resourced, receiving it as a genuine template for how to live. Burke takes that dynamic and puts it through a wringer.
My sister-in-law Erin runs Rocking K Ranch in real life. Not as content. As actual work. We’ve been texting about this book since Mother’s Day, trading articles, falling down rabbit holes together, because she reads it differently than I do and both readings are correct. She couldn’t put it down either. I got it for her as a Mother’s Day gift, which felt appropriate.
The novel is getting a film adaptation with Anne Hathaway attached, which tracks. It has that quality of a story that begs to be pulled apart in a room with other people.
If you liked:
- Don’t Worry Darling
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy