Read and Reviewed: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Friday, 19 December 2025

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

✦ BLURB ✦

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

“Perfection is the prettiest mask for decay.”

💭 Pre-Reading Thoughts

A story about the collapse of a picture-perfect life? Sign me up. I love a good critique of influencer culture, especially when it plays with themes of faith, image, and control. I was hoping for something eerie and psychologically sharp - a peek behind the curtain of curated holiness.

📖 Post-Reading

As I thought...
Burke captures the unsettling polish of performative living with remarkable precision. The details are sharp and hypnotic - the panelled kitchen that conceals a modern oven, the quiet choreography of a family always “on brand.” It’s an excellent metaphor for Natalie herself: polished, hollow, and just barely holding together.

It surprised me by...
How far it pushed its premise. Natalie’s “breaks” - those moments where she forgets everything and wakes believing she’s been kidnapped - lend the book an eerie, cyclical quality. It’s disorienting in a way that feels deliberate, reflecting how denial and control twist together until they become indistinguishable.

But for me, the world around her didn’t quite hold. This family was once globally famous, yet no one ever intervenes or even questions what’s happening. As a metaphor for complicity, it’s haunting. As a literal reality, it strained belief just enough to pull me out. Still, I admire how deeply Burke committed to her vision - it’s an ambitious, thought-provoking study of image, faith, and the slow collapse of a curated identity.

🎵 Music Pairing

🎵 Featured Song: “Control” – Halsey
🎶 Vibe Album: Norman Fucking Rockwell! – Lana Del Rey
🎧 Artist Recommendation: Lorde’s Melodrama — that same blend of confession and performance.

🌫️ Vibe Check

Colour Palette: Candlelight ivory, old rose, oxidized red
Soundtrack: A hymn through a broken speaker
Season: Late winter
Mood: Quiet dread wrapped in domestic calm
Scent: Lemon polish and candle wax

🃏 Tarot Pull

Bindweed (The Devil) – Gaian Tarot
A figure wrapped in vines, held fast by their own growth. Natalie’s life is the same: the image she cultivated now tangling around her, beautiful from a distance but tightening with every breath.