I finally read Caro Claire Burke’s blockbuster novel Yesteryear, a buzzy book about a tradwife influencer who finds herself transported back in time to those “simpler days” that tradwife culture is so nostalgic for—when women were women and men were men and families lived off the land.
Credit where it’s due: Burke knows how to write a goddamned page-turner. I hated setting Yesteryear down and when I finally cracked it open again I gulped paragraphs down like a drowning man gasping for air. Unlike most writers who have a formula for page-turning thrillers—I’m thinking of Dan Brown and his neverending series of cascading cliffhangers—I don’t exactly understand how Burke pulled this off. That is to say, I don’t know how she made the book as propulsive as it is.
But with all that said, I do have a Hot Take about Yesteryear. Are you ready? I think the book would be better without the time travel element.
But Paul, I can hear you say, that’s the whole reason the book is popular!
Sure, fine. But I think there’s a very slender little novel hiding inside this book that is just a vicious satire of tradwives and influencers, and I think I would enjoy that book even more than I enjoyed Yesteryear. The time travel makes the book a little too obvious, a little too heavy. But I defy you to read the first chapter, when we follow the main character through an ordinary day in her life, and show me a single line that could be edited out.
It is taut as a motherfucker, a thrilling highwire act from a writer who is supremely confident about where she’s going and what she has to say. If the whole book carried that searing tone, you would have had to surgically remove Yesteryear from my fingertips. As it is, I “merely” lost a couple of hours of sleep staying up with the book until I finished it.