YESTERYEAR

A tradwife influencer wakes up to find herself living the old-style life she’s been peddling.

To her millions of followers, Natalie Heller Mills’ life appears perfect: Married to the handsome son of a wealthy, family-values-touting U.S. senator, she spends her days posting content of herself churning butter, baking, and crafting in her impeccable farmhouse kitchen; tending to the chickens and other livestock; and posing with her ever-expanding brood against the picturesque barn and rolling fields of her newly acquired Idaho farm, catchily dubbed “Yesteryear.” But the women who follow her don’t know about the nannies and other modern-day cheats that make the farm and family run. They don’t know Natalie’s husband is soft, shiftless, and perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed. And they certainly don’t know that Natalie is not even close to being the “flawless Christian woman” she projects. “The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to”? Yeah, that’s just for Instagram. When Shannon, the producer Natalie hires to broaden her reach, exposes the disconnect between Online Natalie and Offline Natalie, the influencer’s perfect facade begins to crumble and her dream life becomes a nightmare. After an indeterminate amount of time—“Was it a day, a week, a month?”—Natalie wakes up to find herself in a hardscrabble, early-19th-century version of Yesteryear, with children she doesn’t recognize though they insist they’re hers and a husband who looks, but doesn’t act, like her spouse. How did Natalie get here? Is it a prank, a reality show, time travel? In Natalie, Burke has given us an absolutely riveting character—bitchy, narcissistic, and uncaring, yet also incongruously relatable and wickedly entertaining. As it sends up both MAGA and online culture, this deliciously funny, topical, and fiercely intelligent debut also probes deeper questions about authenticity, ambition, kindness, celebrity, consumerism, and what it means to be a woman in America today. It’s also a propulsive page turner, impossible to put down.

A remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure.