yesteryear: there are no winners on this homestead

Caro Claire Burke’s debut is about Natalie Heller Mills, a tradwife influencer with eight million followers who wakes up in 1855, living the exact pioneer life she’s been cosplaying for her audience. It’s structurally a thriller. But the time travel isn’t really the point of it. The point is that every character in this book is being crushed by the same machine, just from different angles, and that patriarchy doesn’t reward anyone for playing along, not even the men running it. It just hands out different tools to be miserable with.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Natalie built her empire on “Yesteryear Ranch,” a homestead content farm where she performs effortless domesticity for an audience that mostly hate-follows her. Her producer Shannon has an affair with her husband Caleb. Natalie finds out, and it becomes the hinge the whole plot turns on. Then she wakes up in 1855, married to a version of Caleb who is competent and violent in equal measure. It’s eventually revealed there was no time travel. Natalie and Caleb built this regression themselves after the scandal, and Natalie’s mind fractured until she genuinely forgot.

I don’t think Natalie can be wholly blamed for who she became. She was mentally ill by the time this book ends, and she was raised in an environment built to cultivate exactly this, like a petri dish; her own mother handed her the coping mechanisms she later turned into a brand. That’s not a full pardon either. Whatever made her, she was still cruel to nearly everyone in her orbit, and her kids are victims of her specifically, not just of the culture that produced her. Both things are true at once: she was shaped into this, and she still did real damage once she got there. When her adult daughter Clementine finally shows up with a warrant, the kids she removes are undernourished and illiterate. Whether that’s the psychosis talking or years of choices made by someone who, at multiple points, still had the lucidity to know better, the outcome is the same either way: real kids, really harmed.

every character is doing time in the same prison

What this book gets right, even when it’s clumsy elsewhere, is that patriarchy isn’t a force that acts on women alone. It’s a closed system, and everyone inside it is serving a sentence; they just don’t all know it, and they definitely don’t all know they’re not winning.

Natalie’s own internal monologue is the most damning evidence against her, which is the point of an unreliable narrator who narrates anyway. She calls motherhood “its own kind of curation,” and says every woman she knows lied to her about what it would be like. That’s not really about motherhood being hard. It’s a woman building herself a permission slip, projecting her own dishonesty onto every other mother so hers stops feeling like a moral failure and starts feeling universal. When she finally gets a moment of real clarity on the homestead, it isn’t liberating; it’s a death sentence dressed up as an epiphany, framed as her “true role”: to bear children until her body gives out, and to feel gratitude on the hour of her death.

the men don’t get out either

This is the part I think gets undersold in most reviews, and it’s the part I think deserves more attention: the men in this story aren’t running the machine, they’re being run by it too, just from a position that looks like power from the outside.

Modern Caleb is soft, spoiled, the youngest son of a political dynasty, a man Natalie molds into her ideal of a traditional husband. He’s a perpetual disappointment to a father who only sees him as a campaign prop, so he goes looking for identity in the manosphere. By the time we meet “Old Caleb” in the fabricated 1855 timeline, patriarchy has done exactly what it promised him: it gave him dominance over someone, because that was the only value the system had ever offered him. Burke said it best in her Audible interview: he’s “such a little Play-Doh man,” tragic, because neither he nor Natalie has the language to understand what they’re doing to each other. He isn’t happy in the 1855 timeline. He’s just been handed violence instead of the identity he actually wanted.

Doug Mills, Caleb’s father, doesn’t get an interior life in the text, and I don’t think that’s an oversight. He’s pure mechanism, a senator who funds the Yesteryear project as a campaign asset and treats his son and daughter-in-law as inventory. He’s further up the chain than Caleb, but there’s no evidence in the text that being further up the chain has bought him anything resembling contentment either. He’s just gotten better at turning people into tools, which is a different kind of losing, not a version of winning.

There’s a generation-up version of this on Natalie’s side too. Her mother coached her to handle the isolation of domestic life by imagining she was being watched, a direct transmission of the exact coping mechanism Natalie later monetizes. Linda Kay Klein’s research on evangelical purity culture, in Pure, makes a point I kept thinking about: women raised inside these systems are taught their worth is contingent on performing a narrow kind of sweetness and self-erasure, long before an influencer economy exists to monetize it. Natalie didn’t invent the performance. Caleb didn’t invent his either. They both just inherited a role and then got convinced it was a personality.

And then there’s Mary, Natalie’s daughter in the fabricated timeline, doing the real, unglamorous labor of survival while her mother performs a costume version of the same labor for a camera that, in this timeline, doesn’t exist.

even a system with no winners still ranks the losses

Shannon is the one character in this book I don’t think loses, at least not in the way everyone else does. Her line to Natalie, right before everything collapses, is the sharpest in the book: to be a homewrecker, Natalie would need to have had a home to wreck, and what she actually has is a business. That’s not a woman who got used and discarded. That’s a woman who spent the whole book watching Natalie’s brand closely enough to know exactly where the load-bearing wall was, and then put her hand through it.

Natalie’s empire doesn’t collapse because she’s a bad mother, or because she’s built a cynical brand off unpaid labor she hides from her audience. Those things are true the entire length of the book and nobody comes for her over them. What ends her is the confrontation with Shannon, where she strangles her with her bare hands after Shannon delivers that “you don’t even have a family” line. Shannon survives, goes public with footage Natalie’s own daughter recorded, and that’s the avalanche.

But Shannon doesn’t frame what happened as an assault by an enraged wife defending her marriage. Shannon’s version suggests Natalie attacked her because Natalie is queer, not because she’d just discovered her husband’s affair. The text stays ambiguous. Natalie never confirms it, and never denies it either. What I think this shows is that Shannon understood, more precisely than anyone else in the book, which sin the system actually can’t forgive. Assault, even strangulation, slots into a story a fundamentalist audience already knows how to absolve: wronged wife, broken heart, understandable rage. Queerness doesn’t slot into anything. It breaks the architecture the whole system needs to keep running, and Shannon reached for it because she knew it would land harder than the truth. If everyone else in this book is doing time inside a system with no winners, Shannon is the one person who found the lever that actually moves the walls. The book never actually tells us Natalie is queer. What it does show, more than once, is a culture that treats the accusation itself as more socially lethal than an attempted strangulation, and that’s true even in a story where nobody, including the men enforcing the rules, is walking away happy.

the performance cracking

The detail that stuck with me longest wasn’t a plot beat, it was a habit. More than once, Natalie catches herself and consciously adjusts her expression to something “more normal” mid-conversation, monitoring her own face for an audience even in rooms with no camera in them. She describes her followers, in one breath, as “five million tiny fish,” and in another admits most people are morons. That gap, between the sweetness she performs and the contempt she feels, is the most honest thing in the book. I don’t think it’s about Natalie being secretly evil. I think it’s about what happens to a person who’s spent a decade being told her worth is contingent on being endlessly, performatively nice, in a system that never actually pays out on that promise. Purity culture and tradwife culture both run on the same demand: keep sweet, no matter what’s underneath. Natalie’s interior voice is what’s underneath, and it’s resentful and calculating and a little smarter than the persona she’s selling, which might be the saddest part of the whole performance.

what it costs the kids

The part that actually got me, past all the thesis-arguing, was the epilogue. Five years later, Natalie is serving a long sentence for child abuse, not for what happened to Shannon. We also get an excerpt from a memoir by Mary, modeled on Shari Franke’s The House of My Mother, which Burke has cited as direct inspiration. The line, quoted everywhere for good reason: Mary asks her mother if she knows what makes her saddest, how much beauty she’s missed, because the future she prayed her children would never see turns out to be beautiful, and Mary thinks she’d like it, if she gave it a chance.

Sidenote: Mary writing her own bestselling book even though she was illiterate until the age of 18 made my heart swell with pride! What a spectacular girl!

That’s the whole book in two sentences from a child. Natalie built an aesthetic out of a past she never lived in, then got trapped inside a version of it that nearly killed her and her kids, all while convincing herself it was a calling. Caleb got trapped inside a version of manhood that gave him violence instead of the father’s approval he actually wanted. Doug got a son he could use and nothing else. The future Natalie sold to eight million people as something to escape turns out to be the only thing in this story offering anyone actual tenderness.

Shannon is the only person who gets out clean, and she doesn’t get out by playing the game better than everyone else, she gets out by being the one person who could see the whole board. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not really a rebuttal to the rest of it. One person figuring out how to beat a rigged system doesn’t mean the system stops being rigged. There are no winners on this homestead, just one woman who found the exit, and everyone else still doing time.