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Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel
What happens when the perfect life you built online suddenly becomes a nightmare? Natalie Heller Mills has millions of followers, a picture-perfect farmhouse, a handsome husband, and an idyllic family life—at least, that’s what everyone sees. Then one morning, she wakes to a world where electricity is gone, her children are strangers, and she’s expected to live by the rules of another time. As Natalie struggles to understand what happened and find a way back, *Yesteryear* takes a darkly funny, unsettling look at tradition, fame, faith, and the performance of the “perfect” life.
- Release Date
- 2026
- Length
- 400 pages
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
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Our Review
About the book
Natalie Heller Mills is a hugely popular tradwife influencer who films an idealized old-fashioned life on her family’s ranch in Idaho. One morning she wakes up in what appears to be 1855, surrounded by strangers and stripped of every modern comfort, and must survive the very past she has been romanticizing online.
Our review
What happens when a tradwife influencer wakes up in the actual nineteenth century? Exactly the reckoning you’d hope for, and then some.
Burke’s debut has a killer premise and the nerve to follow it into dark places. The early chapters are wickedly funny, as Natalie’s curated performance of homespun virtue collides with the brutal realities of frontier life, and the satire of influencer culture is pointed without being cartoonish. Underneath the comedy runs a genuine mystery about what has happened to her, which keeps the pages turning.
The novel is stronger as a hook than as an exploration. Some of its biggest themes, around motherhood, faith, the body and politics, are raised and then left underdeveloped as the mystery takes over, and Natalie’s voice can feel more like a target than a person. Readers’ patience with the ending will vary. Still, it is a bold, timely book with real narrative pull.
What we loved
- Irresistible, razor-sharp premise
- Dark humor that skewers online nostalgia
- Mystery element sustains suspense
Keep in mind
- Weighty themes are raised but not fully explored
- Protagonist sometimes reads as a satirical target
Read it if you like
Kindred, Rosemary’s Baby, readers who enjoyed satirical suspense like Yellowface
The verdict
A deliciously provocative debut whose premise outshines its depth, but which delivers a sharp, fast ride.
