Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear is the rare satire that keeps sharpening after its premise lands: a tradwife influencer with eight million followers wakes inside the actual 1855 she's spent years performing, and her curated fantasy becomes a survival problem. Darkly funny, genuinely unsettling, and built for arguments.
From the review
Natalie Heller Mills believes she is very good at being alive, and the awful, funny gift of Burke's novel is how completely she lets you live inside that belief before she takes it apart. For the opening stretch you are simply in Natalie's head, and her head is a beautifully lit, relentlessly managed place: a farmhouse styled to within an inch of its life, six photogenic children, a husband chosen partly for how he reads on camera, an audience of millions she thinks of less as people than as weather she can manage. Burke writes this performance from the inside, without winking, so you feel the specific pleasure Natalie takes in a jar of homemade jam catching the light. The satire is there the whole time, but it arrives through devotion rather than mockery, which is a harder and more dangerous trick to pull off.
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