I’ve been so bombarded by the discourse around Caro Claire Burke’s hit novel Yesteryear that I avoided it, but I placed a library hold on the book anyway. It came through this week. I read this 391-page novel in less than 24 hours, and I will probably be thinking about it over the next few weeks. Yesteryear surprised me. So I guess that’s a way of saying it’s a better book than I thought it would be.

If you’ve somehow managed to live your life in such a way that you’ve not heard of this book, I congratulate you. It’s the story of Natalie Heller Mills, tradwife influencer who built a business empire by turning her children and her Idaho ranch into a constant stream of content. Natalie, with her team of nannies and social media producer, churns out photos and videos of her idyllic life: her sourdough starter, her cows and chickens, her ever-pregnant belly, her little girls in flower crowns. Who wouldn’t want that life?

Until one morning when Natalie wakes up in 1855. Her husband is the same man but more hardened. She’s in the same house on the same ranch, but everything is weathered in disrepair. She has several children, but they are not her children from 2026. They look like her and her husband, but they have different names and faces. Their isolated life on the ranch is difficult, laborious, and bleak.

The book alternates between the present day and the 1855 timeline, all told in first person from Natalie’s perspective. For a debut novelist, Burke demonstrates real skill in building out Natalie as a character. Natalie is mean and judgemental, rigid and selfish. Yet, I often felt deeply for her and her situation, both in the present timeline and especially in the 1855 setting. Burke did a good job building Natalie’s backstory and inner world. Natalie is a horrible person, sometimes a victim, often a perpetrator. Throughout it all, I could understand Natalie’s reasoning and motivations, even if I kind of hated her.

I was constantly thinking of other books while reading Yesteryear. I thought frequently of R.F. Kuang’s literary thriller Yellowface, in which the main character and narrator is a truly bad person and horrifically racist, yet I empathized with her even when I didn’t really want to. (Kuang might just be a genius.) At times, I also thought of Miranda July’s All Fours. Both books feature unlikable women making sense of the ways misogyny is wrecking their lives. I couldn’t put any of these books down and read each in a weekend. All three are heavy-handed in their messaging. It’s often messaging I agree with, and I see the value in (some of) the discourse they produced. But it’s all left me a little tired. Sometimes, it’s nice for a novel to just be a novel.

I won’t spoil the ending of Yesteryear, except to say we get an explanation for the 1855 timeline. I found the climax and denouement incredibly rushed. It needed to play it out over another 50-100 pages and would have been served by some editorial rigor to better stick the landing. I have to wonder if the publisher rushed to release this book while tradwives are still part of the zeitgeist. It was a gamble that paid off for them because this book has become a bestseller, but it’s ultimately a disappointment. Yesteryear has enough merit that it deserves a more poignant and satisfying conclusion.

Finally, there’s one other book I thought of constantly. while reading Yesteryear. It’s the other tradwife novel: Jo Piazza’s Everyone is Lying to You that came out over a year ago. Piazza’s book is a decently written thriller, but it’s an airport book – the kind of page-turner that you buy at the airport and finish on the plane. It hits certain beats, and sometimes you can figure out the twist at the end. As such, Everyone is Lying to You was marketed quite differently. It’s been sidelined into a genre space, whereas Yesteryear has received more serious literary and feminist discussion as a work of literary fiction. Honestly, the books are about the same in quality to me, with different strengths and weaknesses. I had more fun reading Everyone is Lying to You than Yesteryear. I’d recommend both books. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts if you read them. But I’m done with the tradwife discourse! Like I said, it’s nice when a novel can just be a novel.