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It feels like everyone is talking about Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear. I can’t scroll through my Goodreads feed without seeing it – every third Fable book club seems to be reading it – there’s even talk of Anne Hathaway adapting it into a movie. It’s taken me far too long to get around to picking it up. This weekend I got the chance to finally read it, and now I have a full review to share with you!

My Yesteryear review:

Yesteryear is a deep dive into the life of Natalie – tradwife, influencer and mother of five. Natalie’s life as a social media influencer on Yesteryear Ranch is, of course, not as perfect as the cameras would have her fans (and haters) believe. Her cowboy husband is a bit of an idiot, and she’s slowly losing her control over her children, social media managers and various staff keeping the farm running. 

Natalie wakes one morning to find herself in a strange, alternate universe – she’s still on Yesteryear Ranch, but she’s in pioneer times, with a family both terrifyingly familiar and definitely wrong. She must face the biggest challenge of her career (and life) so far – find out what’s happened and how to get home, without losing her mind in the process.

Yesteryear is, overall, an incredibly well written and unsettling experience. It’s a very easy book to tear through, but the content is heavy; it explores politics, religion, influencer culture, the ‘manosphere’ – a huge range of modern issues – through the eyes of Natalie. The actual plot of Yesteryear was fine – the twist ending wasn’t mind-blowing, but I can accept it – but the thing that’s impressed me so much about this book is the writing and Natalie’s inner monologue. It’s an exploration of the tradwife movement that we haven’t seen much of before, and I would have read this for Natalie’s character study alone. 

I wasn’t invested in the ‘time travel mystery’ so much as the story of how Natalie and her family got to where they are today. I’d definitely be interested to see a movie adaptation of this – I’m not sure how well it would work, as for me the outstanding part of this book is the main character’s inner monologue. Not sure how well that would translate to screen?

Natalie is both a victim and villain in this story, and as someone who *was* homeschooled in a sheltered environment, the focus on the effect on the children was really interesting to me. Homeschooling and influencer families are a match made in hell, and whether or not you feel the situation in Yesteryear is realistic or satirical, children being used as content by their parents for social media is very much a real issue.

I was really satisfied with this book by the end, and while I can definitely understand why reviews of Yesteryear are so divided, it worked for me. It’s the kind of book where if you don’t enjoy the narrator’s voice, it’s not going to be for you, because Natalie narrates everything constantly.

What were your thoughts on Yesteryear?