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.
The 1800s storyline is intriguing. Is this a dream? A delusion? A reality TV setup? But Mills’ backstory is more compelling and elicits greater sympathy.
Long before launching her Instagram account, Mills—raised in a highly religious and conservative community and then thrown into an impossibly wealthy political family by marriage—constructed an elaborate fantasy world to help reconcile the person she is with the person she thinks she’s supposed to be. Yesteryear may seem at first like a warning about playing pretend to influence strangers online. But it’s ultimately a warning about playing pretend to fool yourself.
