Burke spoon-feeds the irony to the reader...but she doesn’t need to: The premise is already an ingenious, exquisite, be-careful-what-you-wish-for ... And in Burke’s biting prose, Natalie is an electric antiheroine ... The two timelines collapse and Yesteryear draws to a dizzying conclusion.
Burke deftly paints a portrait of a woman whose sharp edges and supreme capability put her at odds with everyone in her life ... Offers a bitingly funny and occasionally heartbreaking twist on the classic Instagram-versus-reality story, and a space to address our own culpability within the safe confines of fiction.
The most intelligent and fully imagined of the new influencer novels ... While the novel ultimately rejects the anti-urban, anti-modern chauvinism of the tradwife, Natalie’s arguments for her way of life are compellingly rendered ... Yesteryear achieves a psychological persuasiveness.
Tackling pop culture ideas of trad wives, social media and the curated reality shown on Instagram, while also exploring more serious themes of religious conservatism, the debut is witty, funny and thought-provoking.
Yesteryear tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a Harvard dropout who marries the idiot scion of a wealthy family, buys a beautiful farm in Idaho, pops out a handful of children, and becomes a bona fide internet-famous tradwife ... As unlikable as Natalie is, I could not help but have empathy. It’s harder to hate someone once you know their whole story. Burke’s writing is honest and accessible ... At the end of the day, that’s the paradox of Yesteryear — and one that makes it worth reading. Burke doesn’t take down the tradwives. She humanizes them.
Could Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear be the first great tradwife novel? This was my hope ... Descriptions of pregnancy and birth are shallow and cliched ... It’s a shame, as is Burke’s choice to remove politics almost entirely from the narrative ... There’s an even more unforgivable sin, however, and that is how Yesteryear uses birth injury and child disability as a plot point. As well as being shockingly cack-handed, the treatment shows a disappointing lack of curiosity on the part of the writer about how these events shape both a mother and a child: it feels cynical and underresearched ... For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.
Yesteryear is a book animated by a palpable fury at the archetype of the tradwife. That’s what makes the premise so irresistible ... I myself read Yesteryear in one long rush, unable to put it down ... But where the book begins to falter is when it tries to suggest that tradwives are just as angry with themselves as feminists are ... Yesteryear punishes the tradwife by making her into someone less than substantial — and so in the end, this bingeable, buzzy novel fails to entirely satisfy.
Burke captures much of the zeitgeist in Natalie’s increasingly delusional, overall disturbing state of mind in both time periods—and in other characters’ collisions with it. The seductive topic, unreliable narrator, and surprisingly creepy vibes are sure to draw readers in and keep them guessing.
Burke...packs more ideas and themes into Yesteryear than can be fully explored in one novel, and readers are bound to be divided on the effectiveness of the ending. But it’s pretty much impossible not to be bewitched and bewildered by the novel’s complicated main character. Natalie may be unlikable, but in Burke’s bleak outline of the options for modern womanhood, many of her choices are understandable.Yesteryear is an entertaining and unpredictable debut that readers will yearn to discuss.
This deliciously funny, topical, and fiercely intelligent debut also probes deeper questions about authenticity, ambition, kindness, celebrity, consumerism, and what it means to be a woman in America today. It’s also a propulsive page turner, impossible to put down. A remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure.
