A dark psychological thriller set in AKRANES and REYKJAVIK, Iceland
Dual timeline novel set in IDAHO
8th July 2026
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, dual timeline novel set in IDAHO
Natalie Heller Mills has the ‘perfect’ tradwife life, she files glossy photos of homely scenes on Social Media, and her curated images prove of great interest to her followers.
At college she struggles to fit in, wearing rather dour and drab clothing, but then she meets her future husband, Caleb, who is from a wealthy family. She soon discovers that he needs a nudge to find gainful employment but soon finds a solution to that problem. She steams through her life with her various children and is undoubtedly the envy of many.
Then, one day, she wakes up on a ranch in the 1850s, where the traditional lifestyle of yesteryear – which of course she espouses with a modern twist in her 21st Century life – is radically different. The clothes are drab, the existence is hard and punishing, and, of course, the contrasts could not be more stark. She tries to break out but blunders about in the wilderness and gets caught by an animal trap. She is then brought back into the house, labeled by ‘her husband’ as an “exhausting wretch of woman“, thus highlighting the power balance between men and women back in the day. Thereafter she is hobbled for a time so she cannot escape. As her mother had sagely observed in the here and now: “The pioneer days were not for the faint of heart”. Yet she learns to “tackle chores and assignments with the obedient pluck of a picture-book pioneer woman”.
The story switches between The Past and The Present, focussing on the go-getting and controlling Natalie in the latter, and the subordinate, nevertheless razor-sharp minion in the former. There is a fair amount of religious zeal and sentiment peppered throughout the narrative, which underpins the thinking and actions of the main character, tempered with something I can only describe as MAGA mantra in The Present, as Natalie strives to pull her husband into line.
She has blagged her way into acquiring the old cattle ranch they live on in The Present by telling the vendor that they want to give their children “a true American childhood”, and that her husband is a natural at farming – only Caleb isn’t fully aware, at that juncture, of his anointed skill set. She lies through her teeth about the teachings of Christianity when he is considering a kindergarten position which will not fit her narrative, and thus he becomes a rancher.
I suppose that Natalie can be described as head-strong, go-getting and sassy. She has very specific views on things and an admirable resilience. She is a very black and white thinker, cows are thick (they’re not), her chickens are “brainless” (they’re not), some mainstream schools make their children crawl on all fours, she states, and she refers to her followers as “my beloved disciples, my furious little women”. There’s a horrible little passive-aggresive interchange with her first in-person fan in the grocery store. She is studiedly unpleasant and I think this is the element that alienated me from the novel: there are examples and interactions that seem to have come off a checklist, the tick-box compilation of how to portray both a modern day influencer (and the grubby reality of ‘real’ life) and a pioneer farmer’s wife of yesteryear.
This story is, of course, a satirical take on the influencer and tradwife industry and, so often, a cinematic trawl through the more bonkers and venal sides of Social Media, which felt, at times, relentless. The novel is sharp, written with energetic panache and real competence. It has garnered terrific reviews (Bella Mackie’s says “Everyone Will Be Talking About It – but IS that actually a positive take?) and it clearly has a lot of money behind it. It is a different and unique kind of story, for sure, but it hammers ideas home, there was little nuance and I was desperate to get to the end (I did want to find out how the two timelines reconcile), so I could pick up a new book that didn’t feel so aggressively trenchant and shouty. I got fed up finding out more about the mirage of her life that resembled a “psychotic little snow-globe“.
Location forms a kind of mood board for the story.
Lots of people LOVE this book, so why not try it yourself.
NOTE ON THE UK HARDBACK BOOK COVER
This is definitely a striking and eye-catching book cover. But, for me, something felt off about the bucolic scene in the top half. I then began to research and it didn’t take me too long to find the original painting by Aelbert Cuyp, a well-known Dutch artist working in 17th Century Netherlands, the Golden Age of Dutch Art. Surely it’s rather sloppy to find a country scene, set in the Netherlands, painted in that period to represent a book set in IDAHO, USA, in the 1850s and modern day. Sometimes in publishing it feels that anything will do, irrespective of appropriateness …. it’s such an odd choice.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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