I was three days into a bad insomnia stretch when I opened Yesteryear. Too tired to read something serious, not quite tired enough to sleep. I thought a quick thriller would do the trick. A tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 and has to survive without modern comforts. Fun, right?
Four hours later, I was still awake. Not because the plot kept me turning pages. Because something in the story had crawled under my skin and I couldn’t scratch it out.
Why Natalie Unsettles Me
Natalie Heller Mills is a monster. She has eight million Instagram followers who think she lives the perfect pioneer life. In reality, she has nannies hiding in the pantry and a production team editing her sourdough videos. She hates her children, resents her husband, and feels nothing but contempt for the women who admire her.
But here’s what got me. I recognized her.
Not the tradwife part. I have never canned jam in my life. But that cold, calculating voice inside her head that calculates how every situation looks from the outside. That voice that judges other women instantly, mercilessly. That part of her that knows she’s lying but keeps performing anyway because stopping would mean facing the empty space underneath.
The plot moves between two timelines. Present-day Natalie, building her empire of lies. And 1855 Natalie, suddenly trapped in the actual pioneer life she pretended to live. She burns her hands on iron pots. Her teeth rot. Her husband is a stranger. The book never fully explains how she got there, and honestly, that’s the point.
What the Time Travel Actually Means
Burke uses the dual timeline not as a gimmick but as a pressure test. In 1855, Natalie has no audience. No comments to read, no engagement metrics, no filtered photos. She is just a woman in a freezing cabin with too many children and not enough food.
This is where the book gets uncomfortable. Because Natalie’s suffering in the past is real, but so is her suffering in the present. She is trapped in both centuries. In one, by poverty and physical labor. In the other, by the relentless performance of happiness that social media demands.
The core image for me was the moment Natalie looks at her 1855 hands. Raw, cracked, bleeding. She thinks about her Instagram hands. Soft, manicured, holding a mason jar of jam just so. Same woman. Same hands. But one version is real and the other is a product, and she can no longer tell which is the lie.
Why This Book Won’t Save You
I’ll be honest. Yesteryear has flaws. The middle drags. Some of the social commentary is a little on the nose, like Burke doesn’t quite trust the reader to get it. The ending feels engineered for maximum drama rather than emotional truth.
But it made me think about my own hands. What am I performing? For whom? And what would be left if the audience disappeared?
This book is good for people who are ready to look at the gap between who they are and who they present themselves to be. It’s bad for anyone who wants a clean thriller with satisfying answers. Also bad for people who genuinely love tradwife content and don’t want to examine why.
What I’m Left With
A question I can’t shake. If every woman is performing womanhood, then who gets to decide when the performance is a lie?
