I really enjoyed this book. A biting look at influencers through the eyes of Natalie. She has decided she doesn’t like her husband very much. He doesn’t work but has pipe dreams on unattainable careers. When he mentions having a farm she jumps at the idea. With her rich father in law on board and stumping up the money they buy a farm and when Natalie decides she wants to pare the farm back and run it the old way, free range and organic. She starts posting the odd photo to her social media accounts of her making bread, churning butter, the crops, cows, chickens. Her baby daughter with the chickens, her and her hubby kissing in the fields with the sun setting behind them…..all the schmalzy things you see on influencers pages. Then an influential friend of her father in law profiles her on his social media and before she knows it she has a million followers. Now with 5 kids she can’t handle things and so behind the scenes of this idyllic farm are workers in the fields, two Nannie’s, pesticides, products made in China. Then a scandal threatens to out them and Natalie suddenly finds herself living a parallel life in the 1800s and it’s much harder than her social medial world.
All in all an enjoyable read although the ending was a bit ………

#Yesteryear. #HarperCollinsAU #NetGalley

Thank you HarperCollins Publishers Australia for the ARC.
I had a lot of fun reading this book and it had me loling!
The story is centred around tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mill’s “perfect” life, which is flipped upside down when she wakes up one day in 1805 with different children and an imposter husband. A captivating and witty commentary on social media, morality and feminism.
The ending had my jaw falling to the floor. Loved it. Go read this book! 4.75 stars

Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear is one of the most prescient novels of the 2020's, and is both a warning and recent history of the political precipice America and the world finds itself standing on.

Natalie runs one of the most well-known tradwife/mommy blogger/homesteading Instagram pages, and delights in flaunting her perfect children, perfect husband, perfect farm - perfect everything - to the masses. Lurking just off screen is an army of unrecognised help, but why do her followers need to know about that? The magic of on-screen excellence rarely translates without some outside assistants. When she wakes one morning, not to her organic cotton, high thread count sheets, but to a rough comforter and lumpy mattress, she realises that while her new reality may resemble her familiar ranch, things are off in ways that she never signed up for.

I am in awe of the world Caro Claire Burke has curated in these pages. These days, it only takes a few swipes on a For You Page to stumble across farm-to-table, homemade, family first content, and Yesteryear delivers in spades what it must be like for the women behind the posts. At times, Yesteryear feels like a fairytale, complete with blissful, happy children and cookbook perfect dinners. But make no mistake, Yesteryear is also a warning about unchecked belief - in God, in American Values (TM), in internet rabbit holes so deep you can't not spiral.

After finishing Yesteryear, I feel it is almost my duty to force all my friends and family to read it too - I cannot wait to hear book club discussions and for lingering questions to be debated. This book will easily sit atop my best reads of this year, and 5 stars hardly feels adequate for the ride it took me on.

A massive thank you to Netgalley and HarperCollins Australia for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.