Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke: A Book Review

Yesteryear is one of the bestselling and most controversial novels of 2026. A debut and a number-one New York Times bestseller, a GMA Book Club pick, and is already being adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway. The waitlist at my library was months-long. AND – The book earns its notoriety.

Synopsis

Yesteryear was published in April 2026. Natalie Heller Mills is thirty-two years old, a tradwife influencer with millions of followers, the carefully curated face of Yesteryear Ranch in rural Idaho. Her charming farmhouse, handsome cowboy husband, six children, and homemade sourdough are the ideal of American traditionalism, the nuclear family, except for the nannies, the production team, the brand-new kitchen, and the $5 million gift from her father-in-law. Then one morning Natalie wakes up and something is wrong. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire. Her children are dirty and different. Her soft-handed husband has become a competent farmer. It is 1855. And Natalie, who has spent years as a performative pioneer for Instagram, must now live it.

My review

Caro Claire Burke is a former editor and co-host of Diabolical Lies, a politics and culture podcast. In 2024, she found herself falling down the tradwife content rabbit hole on TikTok, writing long-form essays on the subject by day and posting short feminist analysis of it by night. One morning she woke up with a single word in her head: “yesteryear.” She started writing the novel that same day. Source. The book sparked a bidding war between fifteen US publishers. Burke’s editor Jenny Jackson fought hard to secure the book, and you can hear her talk about that in the video below. Film rights were sold to Amazon MGM Studios. Anne Hathaway even liaised with Burke and is listed in the novel’s acknowledgements and is set to star and produce the movie. Burke is a committed feminist, having written for the Guardian on tradwife culture. Her piece, titled “Serve, smile, procreate: Yesteryear author Caro Claire Burke on the rise of the tradwife“, is worth reading. She has said she became aware of tradwives as “a topic that allows you to talk about everything, power, gender, race.” But she has also been honest about her own relationship with social media performance, telling Lit Hub that she is “equal parts intoxicated with and disgusted by” the content, and that she feels more critical of her own behaviour online than she does of random tradwife accounts. “I know on a fundamental level that social media is a mass form of performative rot, and yet I stick around anyways.” That self-implication is one of the things that makes this book more interesting than a simple feminist takedown. Burke is inside the maze too. That quote: “equal parts intoxicated with and disgusted by” is, I think, the most accurate description of how I felt reading this book. And how I felt about Natalie throughout. She intoxicates me, she disgusts me. Natalie Heller Mills is one of the greatest unreliable narrators I have encountered. She is cold, calculating, narcissistic, and completely incapable of seeing herself clearly. She turns the character Reena, her former college roommate who went on to become a journalist, into a nemesis. Reena takes up more space in Natalie’s head than Obama does in Trump’s. While Natalie performs contentment, she is obsessively tracking what Reena is doing, what stage of life she’s at, how trivial her existence must be,  certain that Reena will eventually wake up and realise she has wasted her life chasing the wrong dream. The irony is that it is Natalie who is miserable. On page 153, Natalie imagines Reena waking up from a night out,  hungover, half-drunk, headache brewing, while Natalie herself is changing a dirty nappy with poo under her fingernails, desperately performing contentment in case God or her mother is watching. “Now it was January. Which meant Reena was back in Boston in her off-campus apartment. At this very moment, she was probably still in bed, perhaps just waking up now, leaning halfway over the mattress, fingers dragging groggily past empty red Solo cups on the floor, searching for a half-drunk bottle of Gatorade or a Tylenol bottle to soothe her pounding headache. I, on the other hand, was at the changing station, moving through the fourth diaper blowout of the week. My fingernails were dark with shit. I had a deranged expression on my face, something between a grin and a grimace.” The comparison is delicious. Natalie was so wrong about everything, and she doesn’t know it yet. The book’s central quote, which arrives on page 247, captures exactly why this book is both so compelling and so divisive: “The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.” That is Natalie’s operating principle, and it is also the operating principle for the novel. Natalie is designed to be addicting. You cannot stop reading her even when you despise her. The page 165 quote is one of the most precise pieces of writing in the book. The first time Natalie says the word “housewife” about herself out loud: “It was the first time I’d said that word aloud in reference to myself, and now I felt a not unpleasant reorganizing sensation in my body, almost like I was face down on a chiropractor’s table, feeling my spine crack gradually into a strange and new, if technically correct, alignment. A pain that promised to give way to relief.” Exceptional writing. It captures something true about the moment a woman accepts a diminishment she has been telling herself is a choice. The time-slip element, Natalie waking up in 1855 with no explanation, reminded me of In Five Years by Rebecca Serle in its refusal to explain its own mechanics. Accept it. The mystery of what is happening, and why, keeps the pages turning even when Natalie’s behaviour makes you want to put the book down. This book is divisive. Enthusiastic readers call it one of the books of the year. Book Marks, which aggregates professional reviews, describes Natalie as “an electric antiheroine” and calls the book “a bitingly funny and occasionally heartbreaking twist on the classic Instagram-versus-reality story.” The New York Times called it “maddening, mesmerising, ingenious.” I land in the enthusiastic camp. Four stars.

What I liked / what I didn’t

What I liked

Natalie is a genuinely extraordinary creation: cold, calculating, self-deceiving, and completely compelling. Burke’s prose is sharp and precise, with a pitch-black humour that suits the subject. The Natalie/Reena dynamic is great. The dramatic irony of Natalie’s certainty about Reena’s inevitable regret, played against Natalie’s obvious misery. The page 165 quote alone is worth the price of admission. The time-slip premise is high-concept but executed with enough conviction.

What I didn’t

Not a lot. It was close to five stars for me. I’m just very picky about what I will give five stars to.

Final verdict

Yesteryear is fun and horrifying. Natalie Heller Mills is infuriating and riveting, and I could not put her down. Burke has written a book that is of this moment, about performance, about the gap between the life we curate and the life we live, about what the tradwife fantasy actually costs when you try to cash it in. Four stars. Read it, then find someone to argue about it with. That is exactly what it was designed for.

Where can I read it?