Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel “Yesteryear” is not a “beach read.” So if you’re the type of person who scrolls through the NYT Bestseller List (where “Yesteryear” has been sitting since just after its April release) searching for a breezy vacay novel, consider yourself warned.
Despite the book’s page-turner pace and zeitgeist-y premise—a “trad-wife” influencer is mysteriously transported back in time and must survive homesteading circa 1855—it has a deep-cutting darkness that’s pretty hard to shake. Even if you’re reading under a palm tree.
Part time-travel thriller, part political commentary, and part incisive character study, the story is told from the perspective of unreliable narrator Natalie Heller Mills. Less anti-heroine than villain-as-protagonist, she’s a conservative Christian, a mother, a wife, and, above all else, a content creator.
Her niche? Churning butter, cooking Sunday roasts “from scratch,” touting fundamentalist religious values, and making the whole thing look effortless.
“Yesteryear” author Caro Claire Burke is also the co-host of the culture podcast “Diabolical Lies.” Credit: Riley Haakon.
A majority of the book takes place in southern Idaho at Natalie’s farm called—or maybe more accurately, branded—Yesteryear. It’s vast and somewhat secluded; a 30-minute drive to the nearest Super Target is treated as a special occasion. And, thanks to the millions of followers on Natalie’s @YesteryearRanch Instagram, it’s famous.
No part of Natalie’s world is safe from her urge to stage it, record it, and monetize it. Her generationally wealthy husband, Caleb, does his best to play the rugged picture of “traditional” masculinity. Her kids are cast against their will as doting, well-behaved extras. Like any well-oiled production, there’s also a crew—nannies, farmhands, and a content-planning producer—which Natalie purposefully hides from her followers to preserve her self-sufficient image.
Even the rural setting has its role in her facade. “The sky and mountains performed beautifully for us,” Natalie reflects after filming multiple takes of herself collecting eggs from the chicken coop.
This exploitative relationship that Natalie has with her surroundings begins even before she moves her family to Idaho. In fact, her initial interest in farm living comes as a complete whim, a last-ditch effort to stop Caleb from becoming a substitute kindergarten teacher (“Humiliation incarnate,” according to Natalie’s scathing inner monologue). She’d much prefer he become a “cowboy,” although he has no background in ranching, or frankly, hard work.
“We want to give our children a true American childhood. And my husband is a natural at farming!” Natalie fibs to the original owner of Yesteryear to convince him to sell. Yet her act can’t quite fool someone who understands the intense labor it takes to maintain a farm. He warns against the “trend” of “young people fancy[ing] themselves farmers,” evoking #cottagecore and Ballerina Farm-style romanticizations of homesteading.
But money prevails (as in real-world cases of farmland being scooped up by the highest bidder). Natalie’s ability to go over the asking price secures her the 500-acre plot that will become Yesteryear.
Cover of the bestselling 2026 “trad-wife” novel. Credit: Penguin Random House
The novel’s biting critique hits its stride when Natalie wakes up one day to find herself inexplicably in the year 1855. Geographically, she’s still on her property, but without the modern conveniences and hired help, her rural home feels utterly unfamiliar. Suddenly, life in “the middle of nowhere,” to borrow her phrasing, doesn’t seem so marketable and quaint.
For Natalie, rurality instantly flips from a picturesque backdrop to an isolating prison. It’s a testament to her shallowness, the black-and-white way she’s been indoctrinated to see the world.
There’s a fine line, as critics of “Yesteryear” point out, between creating a complex character with a flat worldview and creating a character who’s flat themselves. Natalie’s unflinching cruelty makes it easy to identify all the ways in which she’s a perpetrator (of harmful gender dynamics, casual racism, and child abuse, to name a few offenses). What’s harder, perhaps, is seeing her as a victim—an extremely imperfect one—of the same oppressive systems she’s internalized. Maybe that’s because there’s too much schadenfreude in writing Natalie off as a one-note lost cause.
As you can imagine, it’s a struggle to sit with this particular main character and stomach her hateful judgments against everyone and everything for nearly 400 pages. Only in brief, tragic glimpses does Natalie acknowledge that things could have panned out differently (“I meant to actually learn how to grow things, not just a child or an Instagram account but a carrot, a calf, a sapling”).
I wish there were a few more of these half-epiphanies, though, if only for the reader’s sake. By the time any real self-awareness surfaces for Natalie, the careful-what-you-wish-for plot has already punished her with what is, at least for me, an unexpected final-act twist.
No matter your take on the novel, you likely haven’t heard the last of “Yesteryear,” as a forthcoming film adaptation promises more press and controversy. Anne Hathaway, who is thanked in Burke’s acknowledgments for helping to develop Natalie’s character, is set to star and produce.
Because I’m only human, I’m still a little entranced by “trad-wife” content—which, I’ll admit, occasionally pops up on my feed. But after reading “Yesteryear,” there’s a fresh nagging feeling that comes with every post. I catch myself lingering on them, wondering: Who actually baked that perfectly symmetrical sourdough? What’s concealed behind those stiff smiling selfies? And exactly how many filters stand between what I’m seeing and the reality of rural living?
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up
The post In “Yesteryear,” Homesteading for ‘Likes’ Becomes a Cautionary Tale appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
