Natalie Heller Mills is “the mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to”. The protagonist of Yesteryear, the much talked-about debut novel from Caro Claire Burke, possesses the low-maintenance beauty of a period drama heroine. An adoring mother to six children who are so all-American that one of them is actually named “Stetson”, she spends her days churning butter, baking sourdough and feeding the chickens on her family’s sprawling ranch, Yesteryear.
Its name is something of a mission statement. Natalie is harking back to the good old days of American homesteaders, while broadcasting the minutiae of her aesthetically pleasing ye olde lifestyle to her 8 million followers on Instagram. She is the “tradwife” par excellence, espousing a back-to-basics ethos perfectly calibrated to enthral and appal burnt-out 21st-century women with a doomscrolling habit.
