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 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister.
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.
