“My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.”
This is the money quote from the opening chapter of Yesteryear, an exceptionally buzzy new novel by debut author Caro Claire Burke.
It is also, as readers of the book discover very shortly thereafter, a total lie.
Natalie Mills, the book’s protagonist, is a tradwife influencer who lives with her family on a farm in Idaho—which is to say, she is perfect at looking perfect through the intermediary of a screen. Her reality, on the other hand, is a failure fest. The elaborate dinners she posts on Instagram take so long to make that her five children often fall asleep hungry; the farm where they live is a money-losing, dairy-cow-killing vanity project funded by her husband’s parents. The husband himself is an infantile incompetent who can’t even maintain a proper erection, a disappointment under any circumstances, but a particular problem when his wife has made fecundity into a personal brand.
And this is before the story even unveils its central conceit: One day, Natalie awakens to discover that she’s been inexplicably transported back in time to 1855—where the Little House on the Prairie-style life she’s been pretending to live as an influencer is now, suddenly, her everyday brutal reality.
