Spoiler warning: this review discusses the ending in full. You’ve been warned.
Finishing Yesteryear was like a dream. I had to sit with the book afterwards, and not because of plot mechanics. It’s Natalie herself. What kind of life has to happen to a person before she can build herself a fake century to live in and then genuinely forget she built it? It’s not really a plot twist, but definitely a diagnosis. And amnesia? Used by authors all the time to withhold information from a character. Burke uses it to show what total psychological collapse actually looks like from the inside when it's caused by years of performing as someone you don't have the energy to also actually be. Natalie doesn’t lose her memory just because the story needs a twist. She loses it because maintaining the gap between ‘effortless homesteader’ and ‘woman with a producer, ranch hands, and six kids’ for that long eventually costs you the parts of your mind that know the difference is fake.
For me, that’s the real subject of this book, and it’s why I don’t think it’s useful to talk about it as a story about tradition at all. Natalie isn’t punished by the 1850s. She isn’t humbled by hardship, because she built the hardship and curated it the same way she curated her Instagram. The horror of the ending isn’t that the past was worse than she thought; it’s that building an entire fabricated reality was, for her, a more survivable option than admitting that the current one had failed. A woman so fused with her own brand that the brand's collapse doesn't read to her as an ending; it reads as a problem to be content-managed, even if the only way to manage it is to hallucinate a new set.
Does the portrait work as well without real women standing behind it? Not really. The parallels matter more to me in this book than the plot itself. Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm sells nearly the identical image Natalie sells — a woman effortlessly doing it all by hand on a beautiful farm, and the reporting on her actual daily life describes a woman running on exhaustion, without adequate childcare, inside a structure she publicly insists isn’t a ‘tradwife’ arrangement at all. Even as she performs one for nine million followers. Then we have Nara Smith, where nobody can actually agree whether her 1950s-housewife content is sincere, aspirational, or satire, and I’d argue that ambiguity is itself the symptom. When you can’t tell anyone whether a woman is performing a role or living it, that’s usually a sign the performance has already swallowed the distinction. Exactly how it swallows Natalie. So Burke didn’t create someone unfathomable; she just extrapolated from women who were already visibly strained on that same fault line.
The ending pushes past strain into immediate rupture. That’s where the parallel stops being about aesthetics and starts being about what’s actually hidden behind a wholesome family brand. Shari Franke's memoir The House of My Mother tells almost the same story in nonfiction: a mother whose public image was curated domestic wholesomeness, concealing real abuse that only became visible once the brand cracked and a daughter was left to narrate what the camera had never shown.
Natalie’s arc: convicted of child abuse, her own daughter left to tell the true version of events isn’t an exaggeration of that story so much as fictional confirmation of its logic. Taylor Frankie Paul's MomTok is the lower-stakes version of the same mechanism: an entire community built on a shared, curated Mormon-mom aesthetic that fractured in public the moment the real disorder in people's marriages caught up with the content.
What makes this land as more than a hit piece on influencers is that the discomfort it’s naming is actually real, not just a vibe. Surveys this year show that young women are less enthusiastic than young men about a ‘return to traditional gender roles’ (roughly four in ten women versus six in ten men). Researchers looking at the tradwife trend specifically have argued it tracks less with genuine nostalgia for the 1950s than with plain exhaustion at the impossibility of doing everything modern life demands at once. Most Gen Z women would tell you that household labour should be split by what actually works, and not by gender. Which means the aesthetic Natalie is selling was never really a majority preference to begin with — it's a fantasy of relief from choice, marketed to people who are tired, bought mostly by an audience that doesn't actually want to live it so much as watch someone else pretend to. Natalie isn't selling tradition. She's selling the disappearance of decision-making, and Yesteryear's ending is the argument that disappearing yourself that completely doesn't actually relieve the pressure — it just relocates it somewhere your mind can't recover from.
Rating: 4.5/5. Read it if you want a character study of what's actually underneath the homestead-influencer aesthetic, not just a takedown of it; Natalie is the most interesting part of this book, by a wide margin.
