Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Last winter, after the third or fourth time a friend of mine shared some influencer’s post to their story in hopes of winning the giveaway the influencer was running (hence the need to share the post to their story), I had the thought that social media influencers are, in many ways, no different than pastors preaching the prosperity gospel. Instead of asking for money, they ask for our attention and time, and so many of us willingly give it up in an attempt at reaching… something. I’m not sure what, as it depends on your flavor of influencer, but we wouldn’t be so captured if we didn’t think we could get something out of it, even if it's only a chance to peek into the windows of a (supposed) dream life. Which is why I think the premise of Yesteryear is so intriguing.

In Yesteryear, Natalie Heller Mills turns her nascent dream of a farm and a family into reality through the help of social media (and a $5 million check from her father-in-law). Her children wear the perfect palette of neutrals woven out of natural fibers, eat a healthy diet of food grown and raised on their own land, all of it far away from any liberal influences. It’s everything a good Christian woman could ever want, and it's what she peddles each day from her social media accounts. Who cares if she doesn’t know the first thing about farming? Who cares if her husband, the coddled youngest son of a career politician destined to be president someday (in his mind, at least), spends most of his time spiraling slowly down a right-wing rabbit hole of online misinformation and conspiracy theories? She’s Natalie Heller Mills, and she’s self-proclaimed as “perfect at being alive.” But when she wakes up in the past, with a husband who isn’t quite her husband, and children who aren’t quite her children, she finds herself put to the greatest test of her life.

It would be easy to reduce Yesteryear down to being simply a satire of a specific breed of social media influencing (namely, tradwives), and while it is that, it’s also in some respects a demented coming of age tale of a woman who managed to make one defining decision for herself and her future, but immediately bailed out the moment it didn’t align with her expectations. Natalie is not a likable character, and it’s hard to find sympathy for her. She is horribly judgmental, and uses her religion not only as a spiritual armor against evil, but as a weapon to be wielded against any person, particularly other women, she deems as less than. Going viral online and suddenly finding herself with millions of followers is just proof of her superiority over all the Angry Women out there who look at her pictures and watch her videos and secretly wish they could be just like her (may the checks that this attention gets her always clear, forever and ever, amen).

Caro Claire Burke does an excellent job in teasing this story out. She sets things up quickly, then alternates chapters of Natalie’s life leading up to the moment of her time travel with her experiences of now living in the past. There’s an eeriness to the chapters that depict Natalie’s farmstead life, particularly in the moments when she interacts with Mary, who is now her eldest daughter in this strange past. Mary has an adult weariness about her, the kind of weariness that only comes with being forced to grow up too soon, to be mother to both your younger siblings and your actual mother. The more time Natalie spends with Mary, she also realizes the toll this has taken on Mary, and finds herself strangely upset over the thought that someday soon, Mary will have to leave home to become a wife and mother too, just like Natalie, with no other option for her life. And this is just a fraction of the themes Burke touches on in this book. I haven’t even gotten into Burke’s use of gender roles, politics, being online, and wealth in crafting this story, and it would take a more experienced reviewer than me to deftly pull those pieces together.

I won’t get into too much detail about the ending. Wanting to know how Natalie ended up in the past kept me reading, and I think Burke’s choices in explaining how this happened were unexpected and far from any theory I may have had leading up to the end. I can understand why some might find the ending unsatisfactory, but I also think the conventional explanations would have been taking the easy way out, so I was pleased with the direction Burke took.

Yesteryear is a book that will leave an impression on you, and will have you begging your friends to read it too so you have someone to discuss it with. And if you feel inclined to share this review on your social media pages, feel free! Unfortunately, I have nothing for you to win as an incentive to do so. But I thank you for your attention anyway. Don't forget to follow us online!

Also, if Caro Claire Burke wanted to write a version of this story from the perspective of Natalie’s husband, Caleb, I would 100% read that. He may be a manchild, but I strangely found myself more sympathetic towards him than Natalie. Now that I've read Marianne's excellent review, I perhaps need to ruminate on why I feel that way...

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The 2026 novel Yesteryear begins - seemingly - as a time travel story about a woman at the center of a family farm run on "traditional" values of simple living, hard work and wholesome, organic food production. Oh, and female subservience. And a woman's willingness whether she likes children or not to have as many of them as physically possible until reaching the end of her fertile years. A mix of ideologies and beliefs that isn't wholesome for anybody, it turns out in this story.

It all begins when 24-year-old Caleb Mills and 19-year-old Natalie Heller meet in a church group near Boston. Natalie, a student at Harvard, is an attractive and naive young woman from small town Idaho. Caleb, a graduate of the university unsure of what to do with his life, is from a politically powerful west coast family. All they seem to have in common is having been raised in conservative Christian families, though Caleb's life experience has been more worldly than that of Natalie.

Aside from obvious attractions, it appears that Natalie's lack of worldliness (and presumed lack of discernment) are strong attractions for Caleb. After his campaign of relentless love bombing, the two are married within 3 months. Nevermind the creepiness of her suiter's suffocating behavior toward her; everything else about the vortex Natalie is letting herself be sucked into appears attractive enough. If she was meant to follow Christian family and faith traditions, it might as well be with this impressive family. Instead of the easy life she expected however, during the first year of marriage she finds herself bound to a child-like man who has no ambition whatsoever and who refuses to take responsibility for anything in their life together. As if anyone with such negligible ambition could get into Harvard! 

After a period of financial support from his parents - conditioned on an agreement with her father-in-law that the couple continue growing their family - Natalie realizes that it's up to her to figure out a way to earn a living for her young family. But having given up a full scholarship to Harvard in the middle of her sophomore year to marry this wastrel with whom she is now pregnant with a second child, how is she to do that?  

Thinking over possibilities, she concludes that the only viable one is to become an influencer in the online world of traditional wives - the so-called tradwives. Other women have found it to be lucrative, and for this occupation she has had a lifetime of preparation, having been raised in an ultra-conservative faith community and indoctrinated with beliefs in large families, female subservience, and homemaking over professional ambitions. This perhaps explains the apparent ease with which she walked away from a full Harvard  scholarship when she decided to get married at age 19.  

Her in-laws, exasperated with their son but a little skeptical, don't have any better ideas, and they want Natalie to take their aimless son off their hands. They agree to help the couple set themselves up for this enterprise by purchasing a farm in a remote and beautiful part of Idaho. After settling into it, Natalie's plan falls into place. She begins to create a phony persona and a phony life on Instagram and in videos portraying how an attractive young Chirstian family ostensibly living off the land manages its daily routines. She does it so well and convincingly (to some) that before too long she has thousands of fawning followers and lifestyle aspirants. Meanwhile the family continues to grow along with the family enterprise. A line of popular, ridiculously overpriced Natalie-branded merchandise is developed and soon its website is overwhelmed with purchase orders. Followers enchanted with Natalie and Caleb's rural life don't question how these lifestyle products are manufactured within this "natural" lifestyle. Caleb - learning from YouTube videos and online forums - throws himself into gardening and livestock acquisition and management. He has found that farm life makes him feel purposeful for the first time in his life. Or so he says. And so it appears.

Natalie is so attractive and charming in her videos that within a couple of years - to their astonishment - she and Caleb have a cottage industry earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. But ah, if only she liked children, especially her own! And if only the children didn't find being constantly filmed for public consumption to be so trying! 

In addition to ardent fans, Natalie's videos attract a lot of haters, whom she dubs The Angry Women. The Angry Women are relentlessly skeptical and critical. Natalie tries to ignore the criticisms. Despite the entirely farcical structure of her enterprise, for Natalie it is a psychic contest between The Angry Women and "good Christian women" like herself and her loyal followers. 

Eventually Natalie begins to experience herself as a schism of two distinct personalities that she refers to as online and offline Natalie. Offline Natalie becomes an increasingly angry woman, the impact of which is felt harshly by her family - offline, of course.

In addition to online and offline Natalie there is another duality in the story line: a parallel story that looks like time travel. The short chapters of this novel are organized to switch back and forth between this family's life in the present and its life on the same farm in the year 1855. Their life in 1855 though, is so cold and harsh that re-entering it every other chapter started to feel like a side track I wanted to skip. Natalie herself is constantly trying to figure out how to escape from the 1855 homestead and from her brutal husband. She has little affection for their children, who in return don't show her the affectionate respect one would expect. It's not clear until the very end of the book why we are exposed to this grim, alternate reality.

Back in the present, keeping up the pretense of a perfect and perfectly homespun life nurturing a continuously growing family with love and simple, wholesome, organic food in front of the whole world eventually drives Natalie to exhaustion and an addiction to pills that "calm her down." I stopped reading around this point to listen to a 1966 Rolling Stones song called "Mother's Little Helper," remembering lyrics that capture the dynamics of this family's predicament. 

Had Natalie and her followers read Betty Friedan's 1963 study The Feminine Mystique they could have predicted the outcome. Both Friedan and the Rolling Stones as well as the housewives of the 1950s and '60s had the copyright on the unsustainability of tradwife life.

-Marianne W.