“It Was a Lie, Wasn’t It?”: A Review of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear
Updated: 4 days ago
Caro Claire Burke
Yesteryear
Alfred A. Knopf / 2026 / 391 pp / $30
Reviewed by Saveria Steinkamp / October 2026
Picture your favorite social media influencer: the pristine lighting and aesthetic setting, the easy parade of reels—oh so carefully crafted. How much of what you see do you believe? The phrase “highlight reel” is cliché for a reason; we viewers understand it’s an illusion. But what about the influencers themselves? How much do they believe?
The precarious balance between performance and identity forms the bedrock of Caro Claire Burke’s controversial New York Times bestseller, Yesteryear. For readers familiar with Burke’s “smart,” “sane,” and “unbearable” Diabolical Lies podcast, co-hosted with Katie Gatti Tassin, the irreverent tone of Yesteryear should come as no surprise. The novel’s page-turning flavor of pop-culture satire dovetails with podcast episodes on Christian Nationalism and “The Great Tradwife Exodus.” But Yesteryear is more than clickbait capitalizing on hot-button issues. Released in April of 2026, Burke’s debut novel explores the timeless struggle between women and societal expectations—and what happens when wearing a mask to survive erodes a person from within.
On “the last day of the life [she] imagined” for herself, protagonist Natalie Heller Mills is in her mid-twenties, trapped in an unhappy marriage, pregnant with her sixth child, and indoctrinated in a culture and belief system that offers no way out. Yet she introduces herself as “perfect at being alive” and “a flawless Christian woman,” “the mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to.” The more Natalie describes her life—her husband, Caleb, “soft and spoiled and sweet,” her children and the cow and the chickens and the “big, red barn”—the more disgustingly perfect it all seems.
Don’t worry, it gets worse.
In the opening pages Natalie claims she’s “never had that much trouble with anything in [her] life. Not motherhood, nor marriage, nor building a business, nor serving Him.” There must be something wrong with her, we think. We sense deceit; we’re right. Flashbacks eventually reveal a Natalie who chafed at every turn down the path of “perfect” womanhood. Ill-suited to the superficial values of her fundamental religious community, Natalie learned to lie: to her husband, her family, her children and her followers, and most especially, to herself. In fact, she’s lying to us.
In the early, disappointing days of her marriage, Natalie’s mother gave her this advice: pretend you’re being watched. Natalie took the advice to heart. Unlike her mother’s couch-side cheerleaders, however, Natalie curates a different audience: a faceless mob of online followers. When she buys Yesteryear Ranch (a desperate, last-ditch effort to divert her husband’s interest in teaching Kindergarten), she launches an Instagram account and casts a filter over her life. Caleb, her “unemployable,” too-feminine husband, becomes a romantic cowboy; the Ranch becomes a sustainable, down-to-earth Homestead (don’t mind the insecticide in the corner!). Natalie becomes the perfect, American dream-woman . . . only to have her performance cracked wide open: in the midst of scandal, Natalie’s curated illusion of pioneer-style living is brutally transformed into the real thing, and she wakes up in the 1850s. The how and why of this is a twisting tale best left for readers to discover; the journey does not unfold as one might expect.
Yesteryear is a Möbius strip of identities and timelines. Separated into four segments (The Past, The Present, The Future, and an Epilogue), the linear structure is deceptive, as the novel takes a step back for every step forward. We reach The Present (or is it?) thirty pages in, when Natalie wakes up in a house somehow both her home and not, and stumbles into her kitchen “which is also somehow not [her] kitchen” where she meets children who are not the children she remembers. She sees “1855” carved beside her name on a wall charting heights, along with marks for children’s names she doesn’t recognize, and realizes this is an uncanny simulacrum of her life. As Natalie struggles to orient herself in this twisted reality, her ability to maintain a curated image begins to fail. She narrates her tale out of order and weaves past and present tense together in a self-policing cycle of compulsive revision. We see her waver between online Natalie and real Natalie as she attempts to uncover the truth of what has happened to her. She scrambles to recover that perfect script and we’re along for the ride.
It’s tempting to categorize Yesteryear as a satire in karmic alignment with the “you have no idea how hard historical life really was” comments populating homestead influencer feeds. The cover of the novel sports an endorsement from The New York Times Book Review calling it a “be-careful-what-you-wish-for” story. But like many aspects of Natalie’s story, the Monkey’s Paw premise here is a false trail. No one is more intimately, calculatingly aware of how deceptive her life really is than Natalie herself.
The presentation of Natalie’s past is like everything else in her life: carefully curated. It’s not that she believes her life matches those from a century ago, but that she fools her followers into believing it. She tells us what she wants us to know, including a careful selection of the ugly parts for “authenticity.” Natalie knows imperfection sells an image—and she is selling us on her story.
Natalie, as she projects onto her oldest daughter (and spitting image), “holds her intelligence like a knife behind her back,” constantly blunting her sharp edges, and Burke creates a narrative to match. The beguilingly conversational, first-person narration provides a false sense of simplicity, associated with self-insert fantasy and YA romance. Burke weaponizes our assumptions in this shifting, fractured novel, catching us off guard.
Natalie is an unreliable narrator with the manipulative edge and finessed deception of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert or American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. She joins Grace Marks, protagonist of Atwood’s Alias Grace, in the dubious distinction of being one of few fictional women to occupy this role of uncanny, calculating liar: morally gray, ethically detached, and narcissistic. Yet, through it all, she makes an eerie, unsettling kind of sense. Like Humbert and Grace, Natalie is compelling, convincing; she sucks us into her narrative. We condemn the results of her choices and actions, but Burke muddies the moral waters of Natalie’s decisions, each encumbered by mitigating circumstances designed to engender our sympathies: the unfaithful husband, unreasonable double standards, the pervasive malaise born of believing the world is doomed. Natalie tugs every heartstring she can reach, and feeds us a story crafted to capture us, to convince us to hit that “follow” button.
Our society in recent years has become a hall of mirrors populated by digital doppelgängers. Within this modern panopticon, the question of personal identity has never been more fraught, or more fractured. For those of us with alternate lives on social media—magical, curated carousels where every endeavor is perfect and easy—a sense of dysphoria is pervasive and seemingly unavoidable. Like the Deet and field hands and inheritance money behind the scenes of Yesteryear Ranch, the real, flawed, struggling humans behind the camera exist at odds with the performances we post online. Natalie’s unreliable perspective is warped by the rupture of this duality and upheld by her continued dedication to her pixelated mask. As with all great manipulators, she leaves us to wonder: Who is she really? How much of her story is just another performance? How many of those we follow live similarly duplicitous lives . . . and might we be living that way ourselves?
Saveria Steinkamp is a midwestern artist transposed to Los Angeles, now pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Spalding University. Saveria’s work explores boundaries between nature, identity and the uncanny, and has appeared in Half and One online magazine and quarterly anthology.