Literary Fiction

Book Review: UNDER STORY by Chloe Benjamin

| Jessica Crawford

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin is a 512 page standalone novel published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction

Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story—and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin’s place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.

“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”

At the end of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career, a husband, and a family.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.

Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world, they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?

A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.

Opening Line

Laurel’s first memories of soil–though at the time, she would have called it dirt–came from weeding in her mother’s garden.

My Thoughts

She must remind herself that words like beginning and end, one and two, are a matter of perspective. A line implies before and after; a circle says, And then, and then…

Laurel is a mycologist who leaves her university professorship to wash dishes at a research station in Antarctica after a tragedy leads to the dissolution of her marriage. The isolation and stark beauty of the location suits her, and she makes some good friends. Then a color-changing Arc appears over the icy expanse. Her ex-husband Eli is one of the physicists sent to study the unexplained phenomenon, and the two of them eventually realize the Arc might in fact represent the second chances in life that they had been hoping for.

This reflective and emotional book uses speculative science fiction as a tool to closely examine life, love, and grief. The author incorporated things that have caught her fancy throughout her life as building blocks to craft this moving tale: namely the interconnectedness of all lifeforms (highlighted most particularly here with the relationship between trees and fungi), and results from research performed in Antarctica linked to a theory of a mirror universe. If such a thing were to exist, what kind of opportunities might it present?

Maybe catastrophizing is like freezing a photon in flight: if you fixate on one outcome, all of the others collapse. That’s what fear does, she thinks. It makes you pick a story. If the stays open, the future might hold everything at once.

The beginning of the book (Laurel going to the ends of the Earth to escape her known life with its painful truths) was very good, and the end was pretty excellent (considering topics such as what makes for a meaningful life, and what is “enough”), but the story did drag a bit for me in the middle. I also side-eyed a few details here and there. Even still, I teared up several times during its telling, which for this reader is a sign of success!

And how absurd it is, the bargain of life: that we should be gifted love while guaranteed loss, love’s tax.

This book asks the question, how far would you go to get more time with a lost loved one? I don’t think this will be an all-time favorite like Benjamin’s The Immortalists was for me, but is definitely a strong contender for one of my favorite reads of the year. (And considering these books in conjunction–wow, can this author write, but man, who did she lose?)

Major content warning here for the death of a child

Book Review: SOLACE HOUSE by Will Maclean

| Jessica Crawford

Solace House by Will Maclean is a 512 page standalone novel with a U.S. publication date of October 13, 2026.

Genre

Horror (Literary, Psychological, Occult/Supernatural)

Description

In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.

When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne’s journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and – most mysteriously – his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.

As the students delve deeper into the house’s secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne’s strange opus and its promise of another world… and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.

Opening Line

“So, what are you going to do all summer?” said Marcus idly, through half a sandwich.

My Thoughts

This book is being comped as The Secret History (Donna Tartt) meets The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson). I found that description pretty apt—except that as I read on, I decided it was a good part House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski as well.

A group of college students in the UK have a summer job cleaning out buildings their university is hoping to purchase and turn into residence halls. One is a long-defunct mental asylum, the other the Gothic-style private home of a hoarder who died years before. A compellingly spooky atmosphere is spun with details like the muffled ringing of an old-fashioned telephone sounding occasionally from somewhere in the cluttered mess, and the fact that battery-powered items unfailingly die when in the proximity of Solace House. Then you learn the former occupant was mixed up in some sort of occult business, possibly in response to the manifestations of his own madness. Eventually the story reaches even further, into the nature of reality/time/life itself. There was an interesting variety of characters and a good build up of tension as the reader feels ever more invested in puzzling out what’s really going on.

A few quibbles are that I didn’t fully understand the ending, the synopsis states the story takes place in 1993 but this fact doesn’t become evident until more than 50% in and doesn’t really seem to be at all relevant or necessary, the story of the MC’s parents also seems rather pointless, and there is quite a bit of poetry included. I realize this last one is a me problem, as a reader, but I am extremely likely to simply skip over poems and song lyrics (ahem, Tolkein) in a novel, even though in this case I could tell the poems were going to be relevant to figuring out important messages in the story. I also didn’t super love our main character (or feel much of anything for them, really), and there was at least one of the students whose involvement in the story seemed completely pointless.

Despite these things, I definitely recommend giving this one a read for the vibes and the deep philosophical thinking it encourages.

Book Review: WHISTLER by Ann Patchett

| Jessica Crawford

Whistler by Ann Patchett is a 296 page standalone novel published in June of 2026 by Harper.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Description

The acclaimed, prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling writer returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.

Opening Line

“Old guy,” my husband said in a low voice, his lips touching my ear. “Near the exit sign.”

My Thoughts

This is a literary novel about an adult woman reconnecting with her former stepfather. They already had a lovely relationship during his relatively brief marriage to her mother, but then they also trauma bonded just before circumstances forced them apart for the next several decades.

This is a sweet story, and I loved Eddie. I also quite liked Daphne’s sister Leda and father Buddy, but for the life of me could not understand most of the characters in this book (someone had apparently just been unfriendly, but that wasn’t how I had interpreted the scene; someone was described as witty after saying something completely mundane and unremarkable to this reader). Does the author only interact with pretentious weirdos, and so believes that’s just how everyone in the world is? Even Jonathan, who in most regards was quite lovely, was really annoying me at times – for a spell I believed the story might be heading toward a divorce for the Fullers. And don’t even get me started on Polly, Skip, or…Daphne’s mother (did we ever get her name?)

Was the story of the horse, Whistler, a metaphor for Daphne, or for Eddie, or both? I’m not sure. Regardless, I felt warm all over from the power of the positive relationships in this story. It has some great lines as well: both the profound and the humorous. I appreciated the messages about childhood, parenting, family, death, etc etc.

She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.

And a bonus point for the mention of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo!

Bookshop.org

Book Review: SWITZY by Emma Cline

| Jessica Crawford

Switzy by Emma Cline is a 352 page standalone novel being published today, September 8, 2026, by Random House.

Genre

Literary Fiction

Description

A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times best selling author of The Girls and The Guest. 

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting. 

A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.

This is what David Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades. 

His final destination is Zurich. 

David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life. 

As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he’s relied on, vanish

Opening Line

It was always nighttime there.

My Thoughts

A literary novel about a man with progressing dementia pursuing assisted suicide.

Leave the party right when you think, I’m having such a nice time at this party. Because after that…[it] could only go downhill.

This is an uneasy story about David seeing to a few last things before voluntarily shuffling off this mortal coil before his mind deteriorates any worse than it already has. Perhaps not making amends so much as just acknowledging that mistakes were made.

The telling is somewhat disjointed in a stream of consciousness type style, and of course this stream is a bit rockier than most. It’s pretty well done, although it did start to lag a tiny bit for me in the middle.

This emotional work falls somewhere between 4 and 5 stars for me. The biggest factor pulling it down from 5 for me is that David, though the reader sympathizes with his plight, seems to never have been a particularly likable person. Hard to love spending that much time in his head as a result. And I wished for a tad more closure in regards to one particular character, but how to do so without making it trite is not something I could explain how to do (but hey, I’m not the author!) (But also, the author made their choices about how to handle the various facets of the story, and they don’t all have to jive 100% with every reader, which of course is not possible anyway.)

Overall an important piece of work that will likely make you reflect on aspects of your own life as you have lived it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Bookshop.org

Book Review: BLACKTAIL by Scott Hawkins

| Jessica Crawford

Blacktail by Scott Hawkins is a 288 page standalone novel to be published on September 1st, 2026 by Crown Publishing.

Genre

Fantasy, Horror

Description

A wolf sets out on an epic journey of revenge in this one-of-a-kind dark fantasy—the long-awaited second novel from the author of The Library at Mount Char.

The wolf Blacktail is faithful to his Forest God, but in these times, faith is not enough. His world is besieged by men. Soon his territory will be overrun, and then there will be nowhere left to go. When his mate, a house dog, is killed, Blacktail rebels. He invades the house of her owners, seeking vengeance.

Blacktail’s fury catches the notice of an ancient and terrible feline witch, who makes an offer. What if Blacktail could end the human race responsible for the death of his family and for the destruction of the natural world, altogether? To do so, Blacktail must find and wake the Forest God. Only He might stand against the plague of men. Blacktail knows that his north woods are dwindling to nothing. He sees no other choice.

As Blacktail journeys farther from his wild home and deeper into the world of man, he encounters strangers—animal, mortal, and otherworldly—who, for their own reasons, want to help Blacktail rid the world of humans. Along the way, it becomes clear that he is more than just a wolf. The Forest God is sleeping, yes. But what will be the price of waking him?

Opening Line

Guile snapped to her feet at the sound of gunshots.

My Thoughts

The long-awaited second novel from the author of The Library at Mount Char (an all-time favorite of mine) is as brilliant as it is bloody and brutal.

From such a beginning, all things are possible.

This dark fantasy story, featuring only animals POVs, describes one (half)wolf’s epic journey into cosmic horror territory. In these pages, nature craves revenge against humankind for generations of cruelties and abuses that have left the world in an imbalance. The God of Reason may have granted humans dominion over the birds and beasts, but the gods of the natural world that predate Him surely have something to say about that. If only the most powerful among them, the Forest God, god of the hunt, hadn’t been slumbering and unseen for ages.

“When the god of men went forth to slaughter the gods of beasts, was this not a hunt? It is difficult to kill a thing when the very attempt is an act of worship toward it.”

Perhaps Blacktail might be the one to finally find and wake Him.

“But love died in this one long ago. Now all that’s left in him is judgment.”

This emotional and harrowing fable is so good, but also so hard to read. Readers be warned that it contains a whole heck of a lot of violence by and against animals. But if you can stomach that knowing that it’s not gratuitous here, know that those of you who remarked, “Good for her!” at the end of Stephen King’s Carrie will have a similar reaction to this vengeance tale.

“The secret,” she said, “is that there is no secret. Everyone suffers. Some choose to surrender, and some do not. The nature of your courage, the degree of it…these are entirely up to you.”

One criticism I have is that this story did take a while to really get going, but then things escalate REAL quick!

This was not an easy book to read due to the subject matter, but it was so worth it. I imagine I will find myself thinking about it for some time. Should Hawkins write more novels in the future, he has officially become an autobuy author for me!

Thank you to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Goodreads

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Book Review: ETNA by Paul Yoon

| Jessica Crawford

Etna by Paul Yoon is a 208 standalone novel published by Scribner in August of 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction

Description

Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

Opening Line

I was born near water.

My Thoughts

We need friends, Etna, the bird says. We need a pack.

Even if we lose our pack, I say.

Especially because of that, she says.

Well, I knew going in that this book would ruin me. Obviously that means it’s a contender for my favorite read of the year!

When he was basically still a pup, Etna was taken from the farm by the coast where he was born to be trained as working dog for the military. After four years of helping the troops locate landmines, UEX, and IEDs, he strikes out to try to find his way back home again across a war-ravaged land.

This is a literary novel told from the dog’s POV, with no quotations around dialogue. It is very emotional, as it deals with the devastation of war, both physically and mentally.

I got injured six times. Most times it was only the graze of shrapnel or a bullet or something else small and sharp…

Fuji: she got injured five times.

As time went on, the more hurt she was, the more she wanted to hurt.

And the blue in her eyes grew less blue, and I could never explain that.

He meets others on his journey, both animals and humans, and he is the goodest boy ever.

I highly recommend reading this if you also appreciate being emotionally damaged by books.

Bookshop.org

Book Review: MALIBU RISING by Taylor Jenkins Reid

| Jessica Crawford

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid is a 369 page standalone novel (although part of the “Reidverse”, the author’s works that share a universe) published in 2021.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Description

Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, their lives will change forever.

Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.

Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there.

And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them… and what they will leave behind.

Opening Line

Malibu catches fire.

My Thoughts

Because, just as it is in Malibu’s nature to burn, so was it in one particular person’s nature to set fire and walk away.

I grabbed Malibu Rising when I was in the mood for a thematic summer read that would transport me to a beachy location, and was not disappointed.

The Riva siblings were raised by their brokenhearted and alcoholic mother after their superstar musician father left. Some of them have now found themselves among the elite of Malibu, and the big bash they throw every year, attracting many partygoers from Hollywood, has become legendary. Some chapters tell the story of their origin and upbringing, while alternating ones detail the events as they unfold each hour leading up to 1983’s Riva party, which we are told is going to end with some kind of reckoning.

Throughout most of my time reading this book I thought it would be a 4 star read for me. I wasn’t super engaged in the story, but TJR just has such a talent for writing things that go down so easy while keeping you entertained no matter the subject matter.

But then the last parts of the book, when things go off the rails at the party while the emotional core of family dynamics comes to a head simultaneously, was superb. It rode that last wave right up to a fifth star (ha ha, a little surfing humor there.)

Overall, I didn’t love this as much The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but definitely more than Daisy Jones and the Six.

She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.

Book Review: COUNTRY PEOPLE by Daniel Mason

| Jessica Crawford

Country People by Daniel Mason is a 320 page standalone novel to be published by Random House on July 7, 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction

Blurb

A rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown, from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of North Woods

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Opening Line

…And so my path descended, through the twisting caverns.

My Thoughts

“I…asserted that the world was mad, and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me.” ~Nathaniel Lee, 17th century English dramatist

Country People by Daniel Mason, author of one of my top reads of 2023, North Woods, brings readers along on the journey of one year in the life of the Krzelewski-Petrosian family. The parents are in academia, 45 year old Miles still “working on” his dissertation, the topic of which he has changed several times, when Kate gets offered a visiting faculty position across the country. They pack up their two children and the family dog and leave California for a new home in the Green Mountain area of Vermont.

The narration in this book is quite funny. As an example, when the family first cannot resist stopping at every roadside farmstand they pass,

[they] soon found themselves in possession of more zucchini than they had ever been in possession of in their lives, one of those milestones a person passes without fanfare, but a milestone nonetheless.

There is plenty about country life that surprises these Californian transplants, mostly to their delight. Miles’ current dissertation topic involves Russian folktales, having most recently been changed from Russian peasants in the works of Tolstoy. For the purposes of his research, surely the good people of rural Vermont count as being like peasants? Maybe?

Despite his awareness that flat-earthers existed, Miles had never actually met a live one. He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected, but it was someone more superficially brain-damaged than Hugh, who, for all his looseness with the world of facts, had seemed, until that point, more like a run-of-the-mill mansplainer in his late-forties. But Miles had apparently been living in a bubble, because here was a person with all his teeth, sensible sun protection, and an alpenstock, now holding forth on Pythagoras, ring laser gyroscopes, and the 2017 solar eclipse. Except, he realized after a while, Hugh wasn’t a flat-earther, Hugh was a hollow-earther, and his disdain for flat-earthers seemed to match even his disdain for the general population who believed the world was solid at its core.

Wow, taking it to another level, thought Miles.

The exciting part was that neither Kate nor Miles, in all their lives, had known this was something a person, a nonmedieval person, could believe, that it was even part of the great stock of possible beliefs. But here it was! And Hugh, who took encouragement from the stunned general silence of these hikers, who were now beginning to doubt not only his credibility regarding snakes and wildflowers, but also their personal safety, expressed surprise that no one else had heard this theory, actually two theories, one that held there was both an Inside and an Outside of the Shell, and another that there was only an Inside, and on the outside was the Void.

The story follows the imperfect but highly relatable Miles, devoted husband and father, as he finds himself slipping into the doldrums of otherwise having no professional purpose of his own and failing to meet expectations. For a time he finds solace in hiking through the woods, zen in scything crops with another failed academic husband in the area, joy in learning to ski along the snowy mountainsides. Winter puts the first two on pause, while a knee injury halts the last one.

It’s then that Miles finds a feeling of community in the most unexpected of places. He befriends an eclectic ensemble of locals who all share a belief in a rather fantastic legend lifted from the alleged writings of a man who claimed to have descended into nearby cave systems so far that he stumbled upon another world, a veritable paradise within the Earth’s core. It almost doesn’t matter to Miles that he does not share this specific belief; a man went into a cave and perhaps saw something, but the magic to him is the enthusiasm among the group of people who gather to discuss the story and their research into its different facets, and the sense of belonging they extend to him.

Honestly, it did take me somewhere between 15-20% of the book before I settled in and stopped asking “What is this, exactly?” and started to really enjoy it. It’s a bit difficult to put into words what exactly it’s about, but I can confidently say that it is witty and well-written literary fiction. I’ll borrow from the blurb on Goodreads, because I find it quite accurate: “Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.” Well done!

Thanks, NetGalley and Random House, for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Goodreads

Book Review: YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke

| Jessica Crawford

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!

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!

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