07/11/2026
Available at Redbery!
Okay, I have to be honest with you first.
I almost didn't finish this book. And I'm someone who genuinely believes in giving books a real chance - I've written entire essays about why DNF-ing is a skill, about how quitting takes courage, about honoring your reading experience.
And yet here I was, earphones in, pacing my kitchen, genuinely heated at a fictional woman, at Natalie, talking myself into and out of continuing every other chapter.
So yes. That happened. And I think you deserve to know that before anything else.
"Yesteryear" is Caro Claire Burke's debut - and debut feels like the wrong word for it, honestly. Debut implies someone testing the water, one careful toe at a time. This is not a careful first novel. Burke arrives fully strange and completely certain, writing with a kind of nerve that makes you sit up and pay attention even when - *especially* when - she's making you deeply uncomfortable.
The tradwife phenomenon is the book's entry point, not its ceiling. Burke uses it - the sourdough, the linen, the performative submission - as a magnifying glass, asking why the image of a woman baking bread has become, in 2026, a political act. Why nostalgia has been packaged into an aesthetic. Why the past is something people are selling tickets to rather than reckoning with.
And then she answers that question in a way that will rearrange something behind your eyes. Slowly. Deliberately. Without warning.
And then there is Natalie.
Oh, Natalie.
I listened to this on audio, narrated by Rebecca Lowman, and Lowman does something extraordinary with this character. She captures Natalie's voice so precisely that I found myself gripping my phone like it had personally wronged me. The particular lilt of her self-assurance. The way her certainty hums just underneath every sentence. The cadence of a woman who has built an entire building out of her own perspective and lives inside it so fully she's forgotten there are walls.
Lowman captured all of it. Perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. Because I was *triggered.* Genuinely, repeatedly, put-the-earphones-down-and-go-for-a-walk triggered. At one point I caught myself muttering responses to something Natalie had just said, the way you argue with someone who can't hear you. My sister asked me what I was listening to and I said, *"a book about a woman I want to shake."*
Here's the thing about Natalie. She isn't really a villain. She's not cruel in any obvious, satisfying way that would let you off the hook. She's something more insidious - a woman who believes, with her whole chest, every story she tells about herself. She mentions at some point the "angry women" in her life. The ones who can't seem to move on. The ones who make everything so exhausting and heavy.
And I - listening, pacing - became one of those women. Furious on behalf of everyone in her orbit who she quietly misread, gently dismissed, loved in ways that were really just reflections of herself bouncing back.
You see, I have met Natalie. I have loved people who were Natalie. And if I'm being fully honest - and this whole review is me being fully honest - there are versions of myself, in certain rooms, in certain seasons, edging uncomfortably close.
Burke never winks at you about this. Never nudges you and whispers "we see her, it's okay." She writes Natalie straight-faced and trusting, and leaves you alone with the discomfort of recognition. Which is either extraordinary restraint or a deliberate provocation.
Probably both.
Caro Claire Burke trusted her readers enough not to make this easy. That's a brave thing to do in a debut. A genuinely brave thing.
I almost didn't stay. But I'm so glad I did.
Furious, unsettled, grateful, and still thinking about it.
That's the whole review, really. Everything else is just me trying to explain why.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3SKJvvN
