Pick of the Week: “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke. She Sold the Dream. Then She Had to Live It.

Every week, HootPerch picks one book that deserves to be talked about more. This week, it is the debut everyone spent the spring arguing about, a novel that takes one of the most photographed fantasies on the internet and asks, with a cold smile, what if you actually had to live inside it.

Meet Natalie Heller Mills.

She is, by her own account, perfect at being alive. On Yesteryear Ranch she raises her children on raw milk and farm-fresh eggs, bakes her own bread, makes her own soap, and broadcasts all of it to five million adoring followers. She is a tradwife: a woman who has built a brand, and a fortune, on a romantic vision of traditional Christian domesticity. The flawless mother every woman is told to want to be. The wife every man is told to want to come home to. As she puts it herself, like a nun in a porno, it does not make sense, but by God, it works.

Then one morning she wakes up cold, filthy, and terrified, and the year is 1855.

The cabin is freezing. The quilt is hand-stitched and thin. There are children she does not recognise wearing pioneer clothes, calling her Mama. There is a date carved into the doorframe. There is a version of her husband, older and black-eyed, who knocks her unconscious when she tries to run. The dream she sold, the simpler life, the farm, the wholesome pre-modern idyll, has become a prison with no camera crew, no sponsorship, no off switch. And Natalie, who has spent her whole life being watched and performing for the watchers, cannot at first accept that this is not another performance. She is convinced she is being filmed. She is convinced this is a hoax, a twisted reality show, a test she can win. What if it is none of those things?

Caro Claire Burke has written something genuinely inventive here, and genuinely of its moment. Yesteryear is a satire with real teeth, in the lineage of The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid’s Tale, aimed squarely at the tradwife aesthetic and the performance of womanhood it depends on. It is also a psychological suspense novel that keeps you turning pages to find out what is actually happening to Natalie. Burke, who has an MFA from Bennington and co-hosts a culture and politics podcast called Diabolical Lies, understands her target from the inside out: surveillance, performance, the way a life lived for an audience warps your grip on what is real.

The accolades came fast. An instant Sunday Times bestseller. A Good Morning America Book Club pick. The number one breakout debut on Goodreads. A film adaptation in development with Anne Hathaway attached to star and produce. Bella Mackie’s verdict on the cover, that everyone will be talking about this book, turned out to be simple fact.

And now the honest note, because at HootPerch every recommendation comes with one, and this book demands a particularly honest one. Yesteryear divides its readers, and it divides them precisely at the twist. We will protect the ending here, because the experience of not seeing it coming is part of the point. But we can tell you the shape of the disagreement. One camp finds the reveal devastating, ingenious, the thing that elevates the whole book, exactly the dizzying conclusion the New York Times described when it said it did not see the twist coming. The other camp feels the twist narrows the book, trading a sharp critique of an entire ideological system for a more familiar and more comfortable story of one individual’s collapse, and wishes the novel had trusted its brilliant premise enough to say less and perform less. Some readers found the whole thing a little exhausting, a book that occasionally becomes the very thing it condemns.

Here is our position: that argument is the reason to read it, not a reason to avoid it. A book that leaves half its readers convinced it is a masterpiece and the other half convinced it fumbled the landing is a book worth forming your own opinion about. Very few novels this year will give you as much to discuss.

And that is exactly what makes it such a strong HootPerch challenge book. Yesteryear runs on a dual timeline and a narrator you cannot fully trust, and everything depends on what you notice: the details of how Natalie built her empire, the cracks in her present, the clues seeded before the reveal. A reader gliding along the surface will hit the ending and feel ambushed. A reader paying close attention will experience it as something the book was building toward all along. The comprehension challenge is where that difference lives.

Read it. Then find the nearest person who has also read it and settle in, because you are going to disagree about the ending, and that is the whole delight of it.

Our Pick of the Week.

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