Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke * * * * *
This book is marketed all wrong. Interestingly, this is not the first book I have encountered recently that was sold almost entirely through trendy buzzwords. A romantasy that is not really a romantasy. A humorous fantasy that is barely funny. Now a novel advertised as being about a trad wife and time travel that is actually about something much more interesting.
On the surface, Natalie seems to be exactly what social media celebrates. She is a successful trad wife influencer living on a ranch with her growing family, baking bread, raising children, and presenting the image of the perfect conservative Christian wife. When strange events suddenly disrupt her life, the story splits into two timelines. One follows her present, while the other gradually reveals the path that brought her to this point.
The book spends far more time exploring Natalie's past than I initially expected, but I quickly understood why. This is not really a story about influencer culture. It is a story about identity, self deception, and the devastating consequences of trying to force yourself into a role that fundamentally contradicts who you are.
Natalie is one of the most fascinating protagonists I have read this year. She is intelligent, capable, ambitious, and driven. Those qualities should allow her to build an independent life. Instead, she spends years trying to suppress every single one of them because she has been taught that a good Christian woman should be submissive, self-sacrificing, and content with motherhood above everything else. She is constantly performing the role she believes she is supposed to play, even when her own thoughts are screaming that something is wrong.
The first person narration is essential to making this work. The contrast between the woman Natalie presents to the world and the person living inside her own head is enormous. Outwardly she is polite, gentle, and devoted. Internally she is sarcastic, judgmental, convinced that her values make her morally superior, and quietly frustrated with almost every aspect of the life she has built. She can be deeply unlikeable at times, but that is exactly what makes her feel real. The smug certainty of youth slowly collides with reality, and watching those cracks widen becomes one of the novel's greatest strengths.
Her marriage is equally tragic. Natalie believes she is marrying the strong Christian leader she has always imagined herself wanting. Instead, she discovers that the man beside her is nothing like the fantasy she built in her own mind. Yet divorce is never a real option in her worldview. She keeps trying to rescue a marriage that cannot be fixed, convincing herself that if she simply works harder, sacrifices more, or becomes a better wife, everything will eventually fall into place.
That same pattern shapes her influencer career. She does not begin with malicious intentions or a calculated desire to deceive people. She simply stumbles into an image that becomes successful. The more attention she receives, the more trapped she becomes inside the version of herself that everyone else wants to see. Her online persona eventually becomes just another mask, no different from the one she has been wearing since childhood.
The supporting characters reinforce these ideas beautifully. Natalie constantly compares herself to other women, believing she has already figured life out while they are still making mistakes. Ironically, those women are actually discovering themselves through trial and error, while Natalie follows a path chosen by everyone except herself. She mistakes obedience for maturity and certainty for wisdom.
The novel also asks uncomfortable questions about conservative religious expectations, gender roles, marriage, and motherhood. It never feels like a simple attack on religion. Instead, it examines what happens when an individual loses the freedom to decide what kind of life would actually make them happy. Natalie keeps chasing an ideal that was never truly hers. Every major decision she makes grows from that single mistake.
The ending completely recontextualised everything that came before it. Without spoiling anything, I thought the final act was bold, unsettling, and emotionally devastating. It transformed the novel from an interesting character study into one that I suspect I will be thinking about for a very long time.
I ended up giving Yesteryear five stars. Not because every part of it was perfect, but because it stayed with me long after I finished it. More than anything else, I kept wondering who Natalie could have become if she had been given the freedom to discover herself instead of spending her entire life trying to become someone else. That question is far more haunting than any time travel story could ever have been.
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