It's rare for a novel to open with a protagonist as deliciously and immediately hateable as Natalie Heller Mills, the faux-homesteading tradwife influencer at the center of Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear. "I was perfect at being alive," she informs readers early on. But Natalie turns out to be an unreliable narrator of her own life.
Yesteryear weaves together the story of how Natalie came to be queen of the Instagram moms with a look at her current surreal predicament: waking up one day in what appears to be a real 1800s homestead. There's an outhouse. Endless laundry to be hand-washed. A husband who isn't averse to hitting her if she tries to wander off.
