Oct 12, 2026 10:00pm IST
Yesteryear ‘Review’: A clever, chaotic, compulsively readable debut
Yesteryear
Author: Caro Claire Burke
Pages: 400
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Price: ₹599/-
It’s impossible to ignore “Yesteryear” ecause it was impossible to ignore. It seemed to be everywhere. Every time you turned around, someone was either calling it one of the year’s best debuts or wondering what all the fuss was about.
Caro Claire Burke’s debut has quickly become one of the year’s buzziest and most polarising novels. You’ll probably either love what it’s trying to do or spend the entire book wishing it had gone in a different direction. Whichever camp you end up in, one thing is difficult to argue with. This book is ridiculously entertaining. The tradwife phenomenon has dominated social media over the last few years, and “Yesteryear” takes that perfectly curated fantasy and asks a wonderfully uncomfortable question. What happens when the woman selling that dream actually has to live it?
Related Stories
Natalie Heller Mills has built an empire around exactly that fantasy. A Harvard dropout turned tradwife influencer, she lives on Yesteryear Ranch with her handsome cowboy husband Caleb, their perfect children and millions of followers who can’t get enough of her sourdough loaves, prairie dresses, homeschooling tips and picture-perfect Christian homemaking. To her followers, she has it all. Offline, though, the picture looks very different. Her marriage is quietly imploding, Caleb’s politically connected family has its own expectations, and the idyllic life Natalie sells to millions is held together with strategic edits, careful branding and a whole lot of illusion.
Then Natalie wakes up in 1855. That’s all I’m going to say about the plot because watching it all unravel is half the fun. Every glossy idea Natalie has built her career on collides headfirst with reality. It’s easy to romanticise the 19th century when you’re hiding modern appliances behind antique cupboards. It’s considerably harder when there are no appliances, no electricity, no antibiotics, no running water and very little agency. The sourdough is no longer content. It’s survival. The prairie dresses are no longer an aesthetic. They’re simply what women wear while doing relentless physical labour.
And you’re left wondering whether Natalie has travelled through time, lost her mind or stumbled into something far stranger.
Natalie is not always likeable, but she is endlessly fascinating. She’s ambitious, image-conscious, occasionally infuriating and surprisingly funny. Some of her internal commentary had me cackling. Burke’s sharpest observations aren’t really about butter churning or sourdough starters. They’re about performance, branding and the exhausting business of turning yourself into content.
The satire is biting, but it never overwhelms the story. Just when you think you have figured everything out, another complication comes along and you happily fall into the “just one more chapter” trap more than once. No matter where the novel goes, it never stops being a page-turner.
Popular on Variety
I finished “Yesteryear” with questions and I suspect that was always the intention. Love it or hate it, this is one of those books that’s impossible to dismiss. It’s bold, clever, funny and endlessly readable. More importantly, it earns every bit of the conversation surrounding it.
Comments are moderated. They may be edited for clarity and reprinting in whole or in part in Variety publications.