Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear opens with a brilliant line: “My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.” It’s funny, unsettling and instantly revealing.

Natalie is a tradwife influencer who has built an empire around the idea of wholesome domestic perfection: sourdough, prairie dresses, raw milk, farm-fresh eggs, a handsome cowboy husband and a growing brood of children. Natalie’s life may appear rustic and authentic online, but behind the scenes there are nannies, producers, hidden appliances and a great deal of careful image management.

She is not naive. She knows exactly what her audience wants and she knows how to give it to them. In that sense, the book is a clever satire of influencer culture, but it is also more than that. It explores motherhood, marriage, faith, politics, ambition and the uncomfortable ways women are rewarded for appearing both effortless and exhausted.

The novel becomes especially compelling when Natalie wakes up inside a brutal, tech-free version of the life she has been selling. There is no running water, no modern comfort, no camera-ready glow, just the hard physical reality of the traditional world she has romanticised. The question of whether Natalie is experiencing time travel, a hoax, a breakdown or something more sinister keeps the story moving. But the real tension lies in what happens when an aesthetic becomes a trap.

Natalie is not always likeable, but she is fascinating. Caro Claire Burke does an excellent job of showing how her need for control affects everyone around her, particularly her children. The novel also raises sharp questions about children being turned into content, and how easily family life can become performance when the audience becomes part of the household.

“In the winter of 2024, I was already involved in the online tradwife discourse, so that was the seed of inspiration. I already had the opportunity, through work and my personal time, to research and spend time thinking about women in fundamentalist communities. But there was a specific morning when I woke up with the title of the novel and the synopsis of a woman who wakes up in a different time period. I emailed my agent, a wonderful creative partner, and she was super on board. From the start, Yesteryear felt like such a big, bold story,” says Caro, whose novel is currently being adapted for film.

Overall, Yesteryear is darkly funny, unsettling and very readable. Follow Caro Claire Burke online and access book club discussion notes here. 

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

HarperCollins