Hello, lovely summer readers. If you’ve read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – it’s time to open up the discussion on this summer’s most talked about book. Spoilers are welcome, so if you haven’t read the book and want to, this isn’t the post for you!
If you have read and reviewed it, do leave a link to your review in the comments… (my review here)
Here are a few points you might want to pick up on… (purely my PoV)
- The whole ‘tradwife’ thing – are the women embracing it doing it willingly? How different is it to the ‘manosphere’?
- The whole influencer thing – in this case, selling the ‘enhanced’ lifestyle – can it be believed? Is it totally fake?
- Did you pick up on the clues to the twist to come? There was one really obvious one, and others less obvious…
- Were you disappointed at it not being like Kindred (re time travel) – or did you think it clever?
- Did you have any sympathies with Natalie? Ditto: Clementine, Mary and Maeve.
- And what about Caleb the dreamer, and his nasty ‘Tr*mpian’ father, Donald?
- Did you find the characters to be stereotypes, clichéd? Does it matter?
I’m sure you’ll have many more questions and points to make.
Let’s discuss!
I still don’t know if I’m going to read this one so probably won’t follow the discussion. I was talking to a friend at the weekend whose daughters had read and loved it. They’re late in their 20s/early 30s. I’d love to talk to them about it as I think there may be a generational element to responses. Does that sound possible?
I think you’re right. Old cynics like me will question the behaviours of the characters much more, but will be less invested, as we already find the whole influencer thing distasteful. We’ve also seen too many of the stereotypes through the decades to be taken in by it, although younger generations will call out obvious misogyny etc more readily perhaps.
My review is here. https://drlauratisdall.wordpress.com/2026/04/28/three-grumpy-arc-reviews/ I think I’ve come to feel more negatively towards this book since I wrote it, though!
In answer to some of your questions:
The whole ‘tradwife’ thing – are the women embracing it doing it willingly? How different is it to the ‘manosphere’?
I was disappointed by how little this book actually had to say about tradwives. It ended up being much more about influencer culture – and as I’ve read a lot of novels on this already, I didn’t think YESTERYEAR added much. (A better take is PEOPLE LIKE ME by Ellery Lloyd). I wanted YESTERYEAR to dig much deeper into the psychology of what makes someone decide to be a tradwife, but in order for it to do that, it would have to, for example, have engaged seriously with Christian belief.
Were you disappointed at it not being like Kindred (re time travel) – or did you think it clever?
Yes, hugely – I thought the time travel twist was going to be the novel thing that this book brought to the table. The alternative explanation felt completely unbelievable and silly, and didn’t offer space for Burke to say anything interesting. Highly recommend Jessica M. Goldstein’s RETRO if you want a novel that thinks about the dangers of romanticising the past via commercialised time travel.
Did you have any sympathies with Natalie?
I think the book makes it very hard to sympathise with Natalie, and that this is one of its biggest failings. It’s easy enough to write a book that makes us all dislike a tradwife influencer. It would have been much more interesting to make Natalie more sympathetic, even if we ultimately can’t relate to her choices.
Can’t agree with you more on all your points. The more you think about this novel, the more it disappoints on many fronts. However, it was a good (if at the same time wanting to throw it across the room) read at the time!
SPOILER AHEAD: In my review of the book, I commented on the anachronism of the sea salt which pioneers in inland Idaho wouldn’t have had to make bread with and thought ‘Gotcha!’ Or was it deliberately planted as another clue to what was actually going on? – and thus a fail in the provisioning, and Natalie recognising it as sea salt rather than the salt they would have had, but not registering it – which I now think possible. Which do you think it was?
I thought the sea salt bit came when Natalie was thinking she was in a morbid reality show, and had just ‘found’ a bit of plastic that she thought was part of a microphone. This ends up all being nonsense, of course. But when I was reading it, I did notice the salt and the sourdough starter and thought oh maybe it IS some kind of weird reality show? I would frankly have preferred that to where we ended up!
I may have remembered wrongly, but I thought it was that first awful loaf she baked.
A weird reality show would have been … very like The Trueman Show … I’m not sure whether that would be better or not! (IMHO 😀 )
The one that screamed out for me was the pink glitter gel pen, that couldn’t have been accidental. Clunky perhaps but an object so much a part of parenting young girls through the 1990s and early 2000s (something I was doing at that time). Makes me want to re-read the whole thing in the knowledge of the outcome. And yet, I didn’t dislike this effort as much as Yellowface which tried so hard to take down the whole social media worldlet.
Blimey, gel pen – that one passed over me – I’ll have to find it now! Both Yesteryear and Yellowface descended into farcical endings. I devoured both, but both were unsatisfying upon reflection.
See below, her friend Sara Petersen does actually sell her own sourdough starter on her blogsite whilst ranting about Momfluencers!
Trying to imagine how anyone could sympathize with Natalie–I think this is the trap the novel closes on some readers. You’re not supposed to like an unreliable narrator. It’s like finding a character to sympathize with, watching Arrested Development or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia! Can’t be done without twisting yourself into an unpleasant position.
I did momentarily have a little sympathy for her when she woke up in the new situation, but that soon evaporated!
I didn’t really enjoy this one. I found Natalie so one dimensional in her dislike of everyone and I really didn’t buy the ending.
I found Natalie’s “angrier than the Angry Women” persona and her obviously “not a good Christian” attitudes highly amusing and probably the key to where the whole book sat vis-a-vis our modern aka shallow lifestyle-obsessed commercialised, data-driven world – the monetising, the clicks and likes counting, the how important positive feedback becomes – and yet within that, maybe a comment on the Mormon community, how much conniving Natalie has to do to hang on to any of her generated wealth for herself. I read up on Ballerina Farm and was struck by the slimline woman in those photos after how many children. Could this be real? A friend was reminded of the real-life Ruby Franke story which is on YouTube and had a darker outcome.
In real life, CCB’s own webpage is completely out of date still encouraging us to pre-order the book and advertising tour dates well past. No bio info at all and her own podcast is only co-hosted, I mean who actually is she? Did she bite off more than she could chew? I refer you back to a previous post of mine on this where Anne Hathaway became involved while the book was still in raw state, helping her to flesh out the characters. Finishing the book with the image of Anne Hathaway playing Natalie must have altered CCB’s perception of her own text. AH would already have had a view as to who was going to play the male roles. The filmic version will be almost more interesting as a phenomenon.
It’s a book that wants to make you find out more isn’t it? I’ve stayed away from Ballerina Farm though (not point in getting angry!), but I’d love to know more about CCB – there was one good interview with her I found. There’s a new piece in the New Yorker (but behind a paywall so I couldn’t read, but the LitHub interview with her is well worth reading https://lithub.com/caro-claire-burke-on-tradwives-the-performance-of-selfhood-and-the-good-old-days/
Well well, what a web they weave. Sara Petersen and CCB clearly know each other from journalism and/or podcast circles (or sorority?). Sara has a Substack called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops (recently migrated to Patreon in the current anti-Substack trend) where she alternates between Ballerina Farm taste tests and taking down the (anti-feminist) worlds of women influencers. She also sells her own sourdough there! She has a book called Momfluenced and also a debut novel out soon, A Fascinating Woman, on submissive marriage learnt from a handbook. Both of them manage to talk and have social media presence without telling us a single thing about themselves (oh, CCB has no children and I suspect SP neither). Both of them relish a pretty aggressive vocabulary much like an angry Natalie. How much of their two novels are self-narratizing? I fear for the young women and girls of America if they are prey to these convoluted ‘theories’ of womanhood – ‘choice feminism’ and ‘essentialist femininity’. This from SP’s website: “For Glamour, she tackled the phenomenon of “the hot mom,” revealing the particularly insidious ways patriarchy targets mothers and perpetuates internalized misogyny and body issues.”
Some interesting lines to follow from the interview and beyond – the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is on my radar. Although they focus in the interview on the child-rearing aspects of Yesteryear, there are other threads in there around mother/daughters, father/sons, the four women (the two mothers, the two sisters) none of them a great ‘success’ in their own lives, a husband who is the youngest of four brothers (who remind me of Donny Jr and Eric) and Natalie, the younger of two sisters. I hope CCB takes up the challenge of writing the “Wild West homesteading” novel. I come away thinking about Scout. Compared to these, she appears now as a much more grounded role model for the 21st century young female, one for the revisit list.
Here’s my review: https://litlove.wordpress.com/2026/06/08/yesteryear-or-my-fantasy-is-better-than-your-fantasy/
I felt there was a much more interesting book that might have been written – was on the verge of being written! – about gender rancour and online inauthenticity, the way that young women are still forced to perform roles and feelings they don’t have, about the madness of motherhood as it’s currently lived, but instead we had a book about a twist that works so badly it throws all the decent parts of the story out of the window and ends in a strangled gasp as it tries to manage its inner contradictions.
It’s a shame because this woman can write. I did actually enjoy quite a lot of it, until it became hobbled by its timeline in the ‘past’. Natalie is so blatantly awful that it kind of amused me. I don’t mind following a villain. But I wish she’d been allowed to be a villain rather than a walking psychotic break.
I still think this book has a lot to say about America right now – but given I’m British, I would not be the person to talk about it.