Yesteryear is one of the buzziest releases of 2026 so far. This book is everywhere: it’s been picked up for a movie already (with Anne Hathaway), it’s a book club pick multiple times over, it’s on airport shelves. With its union of commentary on social media influencers, religious fundamentalism, trad wives, political radicalization, and modern motherhood, I think Yesteryear will be part of our Zeitgeist. But does that mean it’s actually good?

My feelings on Yesteryear are mixed. It’s an incredibly ambitious debut, but its degrees of execution vary. At times I found it truly brilliant. At others I felt disappointed. I do think Caro Claire Burke is an author to watch; she has talent and vision that I think could shine even brighter in her next book. Yesteryear didn’t at all feel like a first draft, but it didn’t feel like the final one either.

My biggest criticism of the book is the pacing: it needed to either lose or gain a hundred pages. To Burke’s credit, I was captivated on every page — yet the cohesion and strength of the narrative structure still felt compromised. I don’t have a prescription for how I’d have remedied the pacing, but some areas could have benefited from pruning while others yearned for supplementation. The book quickly transports the reader to the 1800s, but it’s afraid to stay there. We constantly ping-pong back and forth from the narrator’s realtime experience to her flashbacks. I found it tiresome and stagnant despite the illusion of movement, despite enjoying each timeline’s content itself. The author’s ideas are undeniably there, but stronger guidance from the editor(s) would have rendered them more effectively.

Without giving spoilers, the final hundred pages did finally pick up the pace as we came to the Big Reveal. I didn’t feel that it was a total cop-out — the general concept made sense within the context of the characters and story. But it wasn’t totally satisfying, either, and certain elements of the explanations lacked believability which cheapened the denouement.

As someone who grew up very religious and has since deconstructed, I am particularly interested in religious trauma as a theme in fiction. Yesteryear absolutely delivers on that front, with trenchant social commentary on the insidious machinations of the religious right in the US, both on its public consequences and impact on individuals. It’s never explicitly stated which sect Natalie belongs to, and I actually liked this nebulous portrayal as it casts a wide net over the various flavors of American religious fervor. Burke gives us a lot of material to ponder on the topic and you may find me in the forums doing exactly that.

I suspect Natalie will garner little sympathy from many readers, but I found myself sad for her and the real-world women she represents. Though she is an active participant in upholding the image of the trad wife life and all its accompanying ideologies, she is also very much a victim of a patriarchal system which first dehumanized her and divorced her from the sense of selfhood that could have liberated her. The novel captures the internal tug-of-war and cognitive dissonance required of women to join and stay in the fundamentalist world. Perpetrators can still be victims, and victims can still be perpetrators.

Yesteryear opens a portal into multiple heavy and layered themes, but it shies away from fully stepping into them. This is a novel felt like it wanted to be a profound literary fiction but was stuffed into the more commercially viable realm of contemporary fiction. This is not an insult to contemporary fiction, but I do wonder if perhaps this novel was done a disservice by the publishers and the movie deal that was orchestrated before it was ever released.

While I appreciated and enjoyed quite a few things from this novel, ultimately Yesteryear falls short of the glory of its premise. I still felt it was worth reading, but my recommendation would come with some disclaimers.

‼️ CW include domestic abuse (including SA on p210), child abuse/neglect, religious trauma, religious fundamentalism, postpartum, mental health/illness, misogyny/patriarchy, violence (please do not consider this to be a complete list; I am not very skilled at mapping CW)