Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick
A Novel
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4.1 • 3.1K Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) • A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
"A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page."
—Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this satirical literary thriller, a social media star finds herself trapped in the harsh reality behind the domestic fantasy she sells to her audience. Big-league influencer Natalie Mills has perfected her tradwife pitch—the charming farmhouse, the handsome cowboy husband, and the six perfect kids—which she markets relentlessly to her eight million followers. But when she wakes to find herself in the real pioneer world of 1855 with all its challenges, she must struggle to survive and unravel the strange circumstances that landed her in this rustic nightmare. In her stunning debut, author Caro Claire Burke brilliantly alternates timelines and scenarios: swinging from the ultrapolished performance of the present day to Natalie’s harsh new reality. With piercing wit, her social satire skewers the selling of the unattainable tradwife fantasy and all the hard and hidden work it entails behind the scenes, not to mention the toxic notions lurking underneath. This fascinating and timely novel left us gasping.
Customer Reviews
When performances stop being able to perform…
Whew, this was an interesting book.
Caro definitely begs the question concisely about why being a “trad wife” is so trendy without all the weavings and pragmatic weight that it truly holds.
Throughout this journey from 2025 to 1855, back and forth, it felt like we kind of got two books in one, which is quite the delight. Natalie continuing on this mental accounting of her modern life whilst afraid of the reality that she reflects so much light towards via her social media presence was one of the most interesting parts of the story for me.
Overall, this was really funny on many occasions, also provoked a lot of eye rolls, and gave insight into what we’re all afraid to admit about nostalgia: sometimes we romanticize a life because we only ever interact with the aesthetic of it, not the labor, sacrifice, isolation, gender expectations, and loss of autonomy that may come with it.
Natalie herself is such an interesting character because she can be hilarious (by way of making a consistent fool of herself), judgmental (sempiternally), self-righteous (beyond words), vulnerable (was she?), hypocritical (to the third power), and facetiously endearing (...) all within the same chapter. I didn’t always (mostly ever) agree with her, but I was consistently entertained by being inside her head.
I also appreciated how the book interrogated the gap between the life we perform and the life we actually live. Social media allows Natalie to package domesticity into something aspirational, but the novel keeps asking what happens when the performance becomes the expectation, and when the fantasy is stripped of convenience, audience, and control. A major boomerang!
There were moments where the pacing dragged a bit for me, and some of the ideas felt more interesting than the execution surrounding them, which is what kept this from being a full 4-star read; moreover, I was never bored with the central concept, and Caro Claire Burke gave me plenty to think about.
Funny, strange, uncomfortable, occasionally infuriating, and much more layered than I expected. CCB, we want another one!
Unable to divert my eyes
I am a liberal, but I am not sure what the point was in the end. It is like a movie that makes you depressed but you cannot take your eyes off of it. It is a tour de force of modern day thinking, no matter which side you are on. I read all the time, and I could not stop reading it no matter how much I hated it.
Lots of random inaccuracies
I liked the book, but the inaccuracies were irritating and made the book diminish in quality for me.