From the outside looking in, Natalie has the perfect life. She lives on the picturesque Yesteryear Ranch, tucked into the quiet hills of Idaho. Her husband, Caleb—a ruggedly handsome cowboy—runs the agricultural side of the farm, while Natalie raises their six seemingly perfect children. She shares their simple, rustic, all-natural lifestyle with over eight million followers, who watch with envy.
But if social media has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is ever quite as it seems.
In reality, Natalie relies on a team of nannies to wrangle the kids while she maintains her carefully curated image. Her live-in producer, Shannon, ensures everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. And Caleb? He’s never successfully grown a plant or kept an animal alive. Natalie secretly employs real farmers to keep the ranch functioning under the cover of night. Oh, and Caleb is also having an affair with Shannon.
This picture-perfect life is nothing but a façade, and it’s about to collapse.
After discovering the affair and Shannon’s sudden resignation, Natalie retreats to her bedroom, overwhelmed. When she awakes the next day, something is…off. She’s still in the same house, but Caleb is older—years older—and strangely competent. The children are there, but they aren’t her children. And all the modern conveniences that sustained her life are gone. No nannies. No producer. No electricity. No running water.
Has Natalie somehow slipped into the very past she’s been pretending to live in? Or is something far more unsettling at play? Whatever this is, if she wants to salvage her life—and the empire built on it—she’ll have to find a way out.
With Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke bursts onto the literary fiction scene with a debut that may be one of the most original novels I read all year. There’s a sharp, biting irony in forcing a character to confront the harsh realities of the lifestyle she’s built a brand on promoting, but the exploration of hypocrisy is only the beginning of what Burke has in mind.
Burke alternates between Natalie’s present-day predicament and glimpses into her past, gradually constructing the version of her we meet at the novel’s start. It’s a smart, effective structure that deepens our understanding of an admittedly complex and often frustrating protagonist. As Natalie struggles to make sense of her situation, the novel expands into a thoughtful meditation on motherhood, womanhood, religion, politics, and the performative nature of life in the age of social media.
I found myself completely absorbed, eager to uncover the truth behind what was happening. The answer is as bold as you might expect from a novel this daring, though I suspect the ending will prove divisive for some readers. Even so, I was captivated from beginning to end. Yesteryear is a striking debut novel that will almost certainly make my list of favorite reads of the year.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2026, 28)
