Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is a standalone debut novel published by Knopf on April 7, 2026.

Blurb:

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Opening Line:

This is the last day of the life I imagined for myself.

My Thoughts:

America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman.

Except I am angry. I am very, very angry.

How to categorize this book? I wouldn’t say it fits neatly into any one genre, but I think the closest would be literary thriller. I found it exceedingly interesting, in a very angst-ridden and kind of icky way. I was super engaged and tore through it at a good clip, but goodness are these characters hateful!

[People like her] couldn’t possess a truly principled stance even if someone injected it straight into their faces.

Natalie Heller Mills has the perfect life for a traditional Christian woman – or at least, on Instagram she does. Her carefully curated social media presence shows a devoted wife and mother of five (with a sixth on the way), living on a farm in Idaho and eschewing many aspects of modernity in the name of providing her family with a healthy, all natural and organic lifestyle. Behind the scenes, she in fact has two nannies taking care of the kids, migrant workers running the farm, pesticides and modern appliances hidden from the camera, and a troubled marriage.

That was what they taught you in the forums: to be suspicious of everything. I’d watched [him] grow suspicious of schools, and then of the skies, and then of the world–and now, I realized with surprise, he was becoming suspicious of me.

Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in a home that looks similar to but different from her house, with a family that looks similar to but different from her own. There is no evidence of modernity whatsoever, her husband is the manly head of the household she had given up on him ever being, and they are living what seems to be the actual lives of early nineteenth century pioneers on America’s Western front. Is this a test from God? Is it some new reality show pushing the boundaries? Has she really been transported in time to live the kind of life she had falsely been claiming to live for all of her online followers?

The story is told with alternating timelines, when things are coming to a head in Natalie’s world of Instagram fame, and when she finds herself lost in what seems to be an entirely different world. Pretty much every adult character in this book is terrible, just the worst! But this allows the story to reflect on some key issues in today’s world, making for a lot of compelling social commentary.

Liars. Every Christian woman I ever met had been a big fat lying bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat lying bastard souls.

I was all in for learning more about Natalie’s story and understanding what was really going on behind the scenes of her life, but for readers who require likeable characters to root for, be forewarned that you won’t find any here! Between all the people being horrible to one another and the fact that the final reveal felt a bit silly to me, I’m calling this a 4.5 star read for me. As long as you don’t count yourself among the group of readers mentioned above, I do recommend picking this very compulsive book up. And the Letter to the Reader included in the beginning explains that a movie adaption produced by and starring Anne Hathaway is already in the works, so stay tuned for that!