We Need to Talk About Yesteryear

Hate-reading a book about trad-wife influencers wasn't on my bingo card for 2026, but alas, here we are.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke was one of my most anticipated reads of the year — a buzzy debut about Natalie, a five-million-follower tradwife influencer with a sourdough starter and a suspiciously perfect Idaho ranch, who wakes up one morning in 1855 and has to actually live the life she'd been selling.

Because of the parallels to real-life influencers like Ballerina Farm, I was pulled in from the very first page: the prairie dresses, the half-a-dozen children, the husband (who is a complete and total loser, which somehow makes it all worse), and then, behind the scenes — the nannies, the production companies, the inherited airline money running the whole operation (and, shockingly, never pictured).

Despite not being able to put it down, the book made me uncomfortable in a way I wasn't expecting. I kept waiting for the moment it would all click into place, but the satisfying cultural takedown I was anticipating never came. Instead, it went from Ballerina Farm to Ruby Franke real quick. Remember her? The mom influencer whose wholesome Christian parenting content turned out to be concealing something genuinely horrifying. Yeah, that.

In the end, I can't tell if I loved it, hated it, or need to just take it at face value for what it is: a wild ride. But maybe those are all the same thing.