Yesteryear is a masterpiece.

Ajouté : 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Holy moly, mother of God. This novel, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, is a masterpiece. It is perfect. It is ingenious. It is Now, you may have heard about Yesteryear due to the fact that it's being brought to the big screen in a film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, who I believe is also producing the project. And I'm here to tell you right now that the buzz around this book is not being exaggerated. You have to believe the hype for Yesteryear, and I have so much to say, so let's get into it. Funnily enough, Yesteryear is not the first book to be published in 2026 that explores the topic of the tradwife. In fact, the other two books that I'm aware of that are covering the same theme are both called Tradwife. And I recently read and reviewed one of them, Saratoga Shaffer's Tradwife. I loved this book. It is a horror novel in the vein of Rosemary's Baby, but what's curious about these two books, and I won't spend much time comparing them, I promise. They are very different novels, but it's the fact that on the surface, they do seem quite similar. However, when it came to Tradwife, I knew what I was getting into. We have a wannabe tradwife influencer with a wealthy husband and a very manicured lifestyle who will do whatever it takes to secure her following and make herself famous in the tradwife sphere. And the lengths that she goes to in order to secure that position are extremely unhinged and frightening and gory and check out my review if you want to know the whole spiel about this book. It really is wonderful. But all the way through this thing, I was kind of nodding along going, yeah, I understand this culture.

[00:01:38]I understand these people. I understand how they think. their motivations. I even sympathize with the appeal of it.

[00:01:44]Obviously, I am very opposite to a tradwife in almost every sense, but I do understand the appeal. I understand what draws them to this lifestyle. And the fact that it's so transparently easy to sell tradwife culture as a product. So I felt like Saratoga Shaffer and I were on the same page. However, and I really don't mean for Saratoga Shaffer to catch any strays here, but Yesteryear, in my opinion, is a more broadly complex book exploring much larger themes, and I'm going to get into it. The one-sentence pitch for Yesteryear is a tradwife influencer with a wealthy husband and a manicured life wakes up one day in the very past that she has been imitating for clicks, and she doesn't like it.

[00:02:29]That's the set up. That's kind of how the book has been marketed and sold to us. Natalie is a tradwife who wakes up almost 200 years in the past, and now she has to live out the very life that she has been selling to people. So it seems like it's going to be a how would you like it kind of story. Oh, you really think life was better back then?

[00:02:48]For everyone? For women? For mothers in particular? Are you sure? Okay, well, now you've woken up in the past. Deal with it. But that's not really it. I was excited for that, and if that's all it was, it would have been great, but this book is more than that. See, Yesteryear is separated into three parts. Part one is 30 pages long, and it establishes who she is right before Natalie is sent back in time. Part three, at the very end of the book, is just 20 pages of revelations explaining what's been going on, how, and why. And it it is a lot. I did not guess the twist. I did not guess how this book would wrap up, and my jaw was literally on the floor. Well, not literally. Obvi Shut up. Part two of the book is everything else. It is 300-ish pages documenting both who Natalie has been for the past 20 years and who she is forced to be now that she's been apparently sent back in time. Maybe. She has her own suspicions about that. But here's the thing. That midsection of the book, which obviously is like 90% of the book, is separated between the past and the present. Part two's odd-numbered chapters detail where she is now and how she is going to try and survive this hellscape that she's found herself in.

[00:04:02]Picture Robert Eggers's The Witch.

[00:04:14]That's where she is now. While part two's even-numbered chapters are a biography of her entire life from her teenage years right up until her becoming a global sensation as a tradwife influencer with multiple millions of followers spread across Instagram and YouTube. But here's the thing. The odd-numbered of her being stuck back in time or whatever this is, those chapters are only two to three pages a piece. While all of the other chapters that detail her life as she lived it, they go on for about 10 to 20 pages a piece. So this whole she gets sent back in time thing, it's minuscule.

[00:04:49]There must be 50 pages max that are actually set in that time period.

[00:04:54]Everything else is her life, and what a life it is. Natalie was born in a small town in Idaho to an unremarkable working-class family. Her father was kicked out of the house when she was a kid, and her mother told everyone that he died. She even starts to believe it herself. Natalie also has a sister who's two years older than her who ends up getting knocked up by and settling down with a man-child who drinks too much.

[00:05:21]And I'll be honest, as I read that at the beginning of the book, I related to it. It sounds a lot like the life that I grew up with. I'm an only child, but I had cousins who sound a lot like Natalie's sister. Cousins who never moved out of my hometown, who have never really been anywhere or done anything, and I always had loftier ambitions than that, as arrogant as that makes me sound, but it's true. And Natalie was the same way. As a teenager, she wanted more for herself, and so she managed to get into Harvard. Good for her. So off she goes. And before Natalie even reaches the end of her first year in Harvard, she meets a guy called Caleb Mills, who is the son of a very wealthy American politician. Now, American politics confuse me. I can't remember if he's a a senator or a governor, whatever. We learn right at the beginning that he's actually in the running to be president. So that's exciting. We know that. We've got that whole thing to look forward to. And Caleb is such a fun character to follow.

[00:06:17]He is something of a himbo, at least at the beginning. He's a completely empty-headed guy. Natalie's drawn to him because of his wealth and kind of convinces herself that he's more intelligent, interesting, and funny than he really is. After a few months of marriage, the scales fall from her eyes, and she goes, oh my god, is this my husband? Is this my life, really? I I thought he was more interesting than that. Was I fooled by his money? Yeah.

[00:06:42]Yeah, you were. See, Caleb got into Harvard on his family's money and their name alone. He's not a clever guy. But he is very bouncy and positive, at least in his youth. Caleb's brain is an empty jar waiting to be filled with somebody else's ideas. And so Natalie takes that role. She fills his head with her plans for the future, what she wants out of life, and Caleb goes, great, that sounds awesome. See, she drops out of Harvard after her first year because they've gotten married. He's really rich. His family will provide them with whatever kind of life they want. She gets knocked up immediately because she wants to be a mom. She's told herself this is her future. This is her path. And so she drops out to become a mother. Curiously, once her first child is born and she struggles with postnatal, or I think Americans say postpartum depression, she thinks about dying. She thinks about her child dying. She thinks all of the horrible, dark, terrible thoughts that hit women who suffer with postnatal depression. It's it's not nice, and it's all depicted gloves off in this book. So be prepared for that. Caleb, on the other hand, loves playing with kids.

[00:07:47]Wow, being a dad is easy. You just play with them on the floor. Isn't that nice?

[00:07:51]And he thinks about becoming a kindergarten teacher because he likes playing with kids. And she's like, you can't you can't be a kindergarten teacher. And he's like, why not? She can't really explain to him the fact that she needs more success from their marriage, from them as people, than that. She has lofty ambitions. She wants to be rich and successful and powerful and influential and blah blah blah. And the more I think about it, the more she seems to have genuinely psychopathic tendencies. People misunderstand what a psychopath is, so I recommend reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test, and then you'll see how many CEOs and politicians are 100% actual psychopaths.

[00:08:28]Anyway, I do think that perhaps she is a psychopath, but that's that never comes up. It's just kind of an interesting thing to to ponder. But back on their very first date when they were at Harvard, Natalie tells him that her dream is to own an enormous amount of land out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by mountains and rivers and forests and build herself a homestead where they can live off the land and raise a big brood of children who can run around and breathe the fresh air and live off the land and all of that. And it doesn't take long after they've had their first kid for them to turn back around and go, hey, let's go do that.

[00:09:03]Shortly after that, she decides to monetize this, to become an influencer, to put her life out there on display on Instagram and YouTube, and she finds success, especially when, as I said, Caleb is not the brightest spark. He is an empty jar. He's a man without any ideas or any drive of his own, but he has access to the internet, and where does he end up? Down the manosphere rabbit hole. And while he's on a forum, he ends up sharing her Instagram profile with a Joe Rogan type, and overnight, she goes from having a few thousand followers to having a million. Half of whom are progressive feminist women who hate-watch her, which I can't believe is a real thing people do. I don't get it.

[00:09:43]Sounds miserable. And the other half are people who worship her very openly. So she's an overnight success all on the basis of showing off her life and how they live. But it's manicured. It's manufactured, and she has to keep up that pretense. As they get more and more money, they hire nannies and even a producer down the line, all of whom we meet at the very beginning in part one.

[00:10:02]Now, that doesn't even scratch the surface of how much we go into the lives of this couple and their children and the influencer world that she falls into, etc., etc. But there's so much to cover because this book does detail an entire life, a marriage, a job, everything. But as I said, the Natalie falls back in time thing, it doesn't take up a lot of space. So, mostly you get like a 10-page chapter of something important happening in her life as it pertains to her marriage, her being a mother, her being an influencer, etc., followed by a short three-page chapter where she bakes bread and it burns and it's inedible and so she goes hungry. Or she pisses off her husband, a man who looks like Caleb but more haggard and miserable and angry, and so he slaps her. He abuses her. Or at one point early on, she tries to escape whatever this place, this time is. She goes out into the forest and she steps on a bear trap. And so she limps home and we get this grotesque [snorts] detail of her being stitched up and the stitches going through her muscles and it's vile. As a horror fan, I loved it, but it really is grotesque. And they have no antiseptic.

[00:11:13]They have nothing that will guarantee that she'll get through this and won't get an infection and sepsis and and die.

[00:11:21]That's what we get. That that's it. We get little snippets like that. Two to three pages of just something horrible happening to her while she formulates a plan, while she comes up with theories about where she is and and what all of this is and why she's here and how she's here and blah blah blah. And one thing that happens pretty early on, so I'll kind of tease it to you, is that she finds a piece of plastic in the dirt in their home. She lifts it up and it's clearly the clasp of a lapel mic. And so she formulates a theory that she's not back in time, that she's been kidnapped and put on some candid camera thing.

[00:11:55]That she's on a reality TV show that she doesn't understand how she ended up on, but that has to be it. This is all staged. There are hidden cameras everywhere. She's being pranked or punished or something. That has to be it, right? I mean, the bit of plastic is real. That happens like 50 pages into this 400-page book and we learn nothing else until the end. No more clues really. I mean, there are things here and there, but I'm not going to spoil the ending, don't worry, but I will say that with the ending come the big thematic revelations of what this whole book is about and I will talk about those without spoiling anything, I promise. Now, as I said, Caleb is pretty straightforward. He's easy to understand. Caleb is a himbo. He is a privileged young white man who doesn't recognize his privilege, but he's also not really been twisted up by it. He he's innocent. He's, as I said, kind of a himbo kid who then grows up and becomes molded by his wife, by his circumstances, by his father, and by the internet. Caleb is someone you can understand. Every path he walks, every twist and turn in his life, you're like, "Okay, this all makes sense." Natalie.

[00:12:59]Natalie is so much more complicated than that. And I will openly admit to my biases, to my prejudices even, to the assumptions that I've always made as a very far-left, queer, atheist person. My cat is scratching on a scratch pad like two rooms away. It's driving me mad. Oh, close the door. Well, I just closed the door. I can't cuz then the cat goes nuts. You've no idea, okay? You know what it's like to have kids. It's it's >> [laughter] >> It's so difficult. [snorts] The assumptions that I made about Natalie and the way that she surprised me, I think feeds into the very themes of this book itself. Because Natalie is extremely savvy. She's educated. She is driven. She's very perceptive. She thinks that she understands people pretty well. Like I said, she has kind of psychopathic tendencies. She gets herself to Harvard. She is smarter than everyone who was around her when she was a kid. She acted like an adult long before she should have. She's so driven.

[00:14:00]She's so intelligent. She's so savvy.

[00:14:02]And yet, she is a very conservative, anti-feminist, good Christian woman.

[00:14:08]Over and over again, she says "good Christian woman" with capital letters.

[00:14:12]This is her title. She is good Christian woman. And as someone who exists in the internet age, an age of social bubbles and echo chambers, etc., I make assumptions about certain types of people just like anyone does. And it did take me by surprise that someone who is so conservative, such an anti-feminist woman, someone who carries with her so many prejudices when it comes to queer people and women, etc., I was surprised by the fact that she's as clever as she is because prejudice, patriarchal bootlicking, conservative values, these things scream naivety to me. They scream a lack of worldliness, a lack of consideration, a lack of critical thinking, maybe even a lack of general intelligence, whatever that means.

[00:14:56]Intelligent is such a murky word. It doesn't really mean anything. And then it surprised me that Natalie is just so sharp. But all of that kind of feeds into the themes of the book. Because without getting into the ending and the revelations that kind of help us get to this point, Yesteryear is a book about the broader internet culture. It is a book about what late-stage capitalist Western society forces us to be. The ways in which people perform their lives and manufacture their lives as if someone's watching. It's a book about tradwives, yeah, of course, but it is also more broadly a book about people being defined by their sociopolitical affiliations. A book about extreme perspectives and, as I said, echo chambers. It's a book about influencer culture and content creators and the ways in which we stage our lives and exist through the lens of a camera, ironically. I remember reading an article, I'll see if I can dig it up and put it on screen.

[00:15:57]See, I'm a millennial, right? I'm in my 30s, but people are talking and writing articles and even doing studies on the fact that Gen Z and younger kind of behave socially in a distinct way that we haven't seen before, as if they're on camera, as if they are filming themselves, as if they are always taking selfies or making content, putting things out for the algorithm, always behaving as though their life is a performance for the internet. And I don't mean to generalize here, obviously. This is definitely not true for everyone, but it is a phenomenon that people are talking about more broadly. And I feel like this book is exploring that angle. The fact that Natalie is a woman who has curated this life, who has manicured it, who has manufactured it, not just for the internet, but for her people as a means of getting out her philosophy, her ideology, the conservative Christian ideals that she lives by. She believes in this lifestyle. She's not faking that, but she has to fake the lifestyle itself in order to sell it as a product to everyone else. And the fact that, as I said, half of her viewers are people who actually hate her. And this is a thing people do. People hate-watch all the time. I know it's a thing. I genuinely, I don't relate to it. I don't get it. Feels like a real waste of our limited time on Earth, but people do it.

[00:17:10]But even though Yesteryear is a book of big, broad themes about the internet and capitalism and ideologies and performative behaviors and all of that, it is still a book about tradwives. It is still a book about how the conservative grift is almost lazily easy to sell. If you are a cishet white middle-class American person, it's pretty easy to sell you on a romanticized version of your own existence, but dialed up where the queer people or the ethnic minorities or the immigrants who occasionally maybe you have to be slightly aware of in the periphery of your existence, they're suddenly gone entirely. So, the white noise that has invaded modern society, as you might see it, is suddenly gone.

[00:17:55]It's so easy to sell people who already have immense privilege and don't know it on a world where not only do they have that privilege, but they also have peace and quiet, I guess. The conservative grift is wonderfully But not only does it explore the fact that the conservative tradwife grift is something that's very easy to sell, it also exposes the fact that it's very difficult to actually maintain.

[00:18:20]Natalie does not live off the land.

[00:18:23]Natalie does not raise a perfect family.

[00:18:25]Natalie does not have a perfect marriage. Natalie is not entirely self-sustaining, self-sufficient in her home. She has the internet. She hires two nannies. She hires a producer. She goes to supermarkets. She doesn't let her kids have phones, but she's addicted to hers and makes her life and her job off of hers, etc., etc., etc. It's it's all very contradictory and very hypocritical. Yeah, and the book is exploring that. But that feels like a smaller theme. The the hypocrisy of the conservative tradwife ideology. It feels like a smaller theme than the broader themes of the ways in which she manicures her life and the way in which she kind of had to have her life planned out. Because within our kind of late-stage capitalist socioeconomic internet sphere life that that we're all forced to live in because we exist, so many of us are driven by jealousy of other people or wanting success, wanting to be self-sufficient, wanting to be self-employed, wanting passive income, wanting a bigger account, wanting to be perceived a certain way on Instagram.

[00:19:30]And as we go on and on. And like, I'm guilty of all of that.

[00:19:33]So much of what I've just said drives me. I've been self-employed for years now and I don't know how to live not being self-employed because I have so many tisms going on. I was chatting with my upstairs neighbor the other day and she was talking about how all all the kids have got autism these days. And I was like, "Yeah, I've got like eight of them."

[00:19:48]>> [laughter] >> I didn't say that. I kept that to myself and just politely nodded. Yesteryear is a genius work of fiction. It is perfect in every way. I love it so much. It might not end up being my favorite book of this year because as someone who loves genre fiction, I'm more likely to give that to a sci-fi novel or a horror novel that really speaks to me. But, I do think this might end up being the best book published in 2026 that I read this year. I really do think it is the finest work of fiction I've read so far this year. So, go read it. It's incredible. Subscribe for books.