Yesteryear

This week I listened to the audiobook for Yesteryear, the 2026 debut novel by Caro Claire Burke. It’s about a tradwife influencer with about ten kids and ten millions of followers. White, Christian, she lives on a farm in Idaho and makes soap, sells raw milk, that kind of thing. But when she wakes up one day on the same farm in 1852, she must face up to a parallel version of her own life where all those traditions she’d previously marketed become a lot less Instagrammable. I can’t lie, I’m not very interested in writing a review. I’ll say that like: the book had author and readers off in a corner together psychoanalysing a reel of Nara Smith cutting fresh fruit in a ballgown at 5AM. The accounts that copied her; the accounts that couldn’t because their kitchen didn’t have good enough lighting. This book is gossip as criticism. Gossip as a way to play out hypothetical scenarios to their most extreme ends until those hypotheticals seem so probable, actually, that we must all be…