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Your mother lies to you, and then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you are an old woman, looking back at your own life, lying to yourself.

This is a quote from Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke and it’s buried somewhere in the middle of the book. And it’s the best thing in it. Which tells you everything you need to know about where this review is going.

Love it or loathe it, Yesteryear has fast become a marmite book. A quick look at Goodreads and despite it holding a 4 star average, the reviews seem to split almost entirely between one or two stars and five.

The premise is so timely that unless you live under a rock you can’t help but be intrigued. A tradwife influencer – charming rustic farmhouse, cowboy husband, six adorable children – we’ve all seen these women on Instagram and wondered, with varying degrees of charity, how they do it all. Well, our protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills isn’t doing it all. There are two nannies, a full-time content producer, and a kitchen full of modern appliances hidden behind authentic rustic cupboards that her eight million followers will never see.

Until one morning she wakes up in 1855, and has to actually do it. No electricity. No running water. Washing clothes until her fingers bleed. The premise makes you immediately ask: how many tradwives are faking it? And then it goes darker.

In the early chapters before we whizz back in time, Natalie’s inner monologue is expletive-laden and furious – her internal voice so entirely at odds with her wholesome public persona that I laughed out loud more than once. Burke can write. The satire lands. The first third of this book is genuinely good, reading Natalies backstory, her time at university, her upbringing – it all makes a lot of sense as to who she is and why she is the way she is. The story is really good. And then it isn’t.

In the yesteryear sections Natalie is constantly questioning her reality (as you would). Is this an elaborate hoax? A reality show? Time travel? A punishment from ‘Him’ (God)? Well dear reader, you need to read it to find out (or read this and i’ll tell you – don’t worry i’ll let you know when the spoilers begin.)

You can see why me, and thousands of others (it’s a bestseller) have picked this book up off the shelf and devoured it.

So what exactly is wrong with it?

I am going to jump straight to the chase. As I was reading it there was a constant feel that the author wasn’t really telling the story she wanted to. And when I got to the end and read the acknowledgements Anne Hathaway is named. As is Somewhere Pictures, Entertainment 360 and the Amazon film team, all for their support, passion, curiosity and conversations that were “instrumental in bringing Natalie to life.” The film rights were sold before the book was finished. Anne Hathaway has been attached since before publication.

This book was written to be a film. Not adapted into one – written as one. And once you read it with that in mind, you can’t unsee it.

The 1855 chapters are the most obvious casualty. On screen, Natalie hauling firewood, washing clothes, making bread in an 1855 farmhouse is a visual. As prose it has to sustain itself over a hundred pages, and it doesn’t. I found myself skimming sections that should have been the most gripping part of the novel.

The research issues read like a screenplay that nobody fact-checked. A college flashback set around 2010 includes an AIDS scare that belongs firmly in the 1980s. The 1855 children speak in ways that feel distinctly modern. Small things individually, but they accumulate.

And then there’s Natalie herself – who tips from darkly compelling into genuinely unpleasant somewhere in the middle. There’s a difference between an unlikeable protagonist and one who is simply hard to spend time with. Burke crosses that line. By the time the ending arrived, I’d stopped caring what happened to her. Which is a problem, because the ending asks quite a lot of you.

Scroll slowly…

If you haven’t finished and you want to, stop reading now.

Spoilers coming up!

Here is the twist: Natalie hasn’t travelled anywhere. She is in her fifties. She has had a psychotic break. The yesteryear sections aren’t 1855 – they are the life she has actually built, fifteen years in the future, after the internet turned on her and she doubled down into a genuine, unironic version of everything she used to perform. The children who seem like strangers are her second set of children. Her first were taken by social services.

There is a version of this ending that could have been devastating. This isn’t it.

The problem is what the twist does to the book’s actual argument. Yesteryear spends two hundred pages building a case about the performance of womanhood – what happens when women are rewarded for pretending, the gap between the life that’s sold and the life that’s lived. It’s genuinely interesting. And then the ending pulls the rug. Natalie isn’t a participant in a system. She’s a woman who had a breakdown. She isn’t complicit. She’s ill. Tradwife culture gets off the hook. Natalie, who deserved a reckoning, gets a diagnosis instead.

The sexual violence is handled worst of all. In the 1855 sections, Natalie’s husband forces himself on her. She enjoys it – Burke frames this as a contrast with her modern marriage, where her husband struggles to maintain an erection and sex has become perfunctory. The 1855 Caleb is virile, physical, a ‘real man’. He also hits her. On one occasion hard enough that she loses consciousness.

And then you find out it isn’t 1855. It’s the same man. Fifteen years on. Her actual husband, who knows exactly who she is and what has happened to her. The novel doesn’t name what this is. It just moves on. A book that asks you to sit with so much – the performance of womanhood, the cost of the tradwife fantasy, what women accept in exchange for security – cannot bring itself to say the word.

The final chapter switches to the point of view of Mary – Natalie’s eldest daughter from her second set of children. It follows a section where Clementine, the eldest from the first set, arrives with a warrant to remove the younger children from the home. I could not tell you why Burke chose Mary over Clementine for this closing perspective. Clementine is the one who knows the whole story; the before and after, the mother she had and the mother who was left. Mary only knows the 1855 version. It felt like the wrong choice in a book that had already made several wrong choices, and it meant the novel ends on a voice that can’t carry the weight of what it’s been asked to close.

It is also worth noting that none of this is how social services actually works.

I gave it three stars on Goodreads (rounded up from 2.5) and that felt generous.

The premise deserves a better book. The satire deserves a braver ending. And 1855 Natalie deserves something to do beyond laundry and bread. Yesteryawn.

In Good Company is free to read. But if you want to follow along as I try to do something slightly mad – open an independent bookshop with no guarantee it will work – that’s what paid is for. The real numbers, the conversations with booksellers, the decisions I’m making in real time. Plus the knowledge that you’re helping fund the dream, which either feels romantic or reckless depending on the day.

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I would write what would now be known as fan-fiction. An avid reader of Enid Blyton, I would take her characters and write my own adventures. Collecting the paper together, hole-punching them and adding a green and silver toggle from my schoolwork to make a book. I would then jump on my bike and cycle up the cul-de-sac to Vera. A retired English teacher and WW2 evacuee who would read my stories and give me tips. She had a lot of opinions. I’d like to write more about Vera and her impact on my love of reading and writing but that’s for another time.

Over the last two decades I’ve started – and deleted – fifteen or more blogs. Including three Substacks. Every time I’ve found myself niched to something I rapidly lose interest in writing about – because the thing is – I am not one dimensional. Who is?

I am a Vinted addict. I am currently wearing an entire second-hand outfit: a Sezane shirt with blue ticking stripes, a Beyond Nine grey cotton v-neck knit tank, a pair of brand new Birkenstocks to replace my decade-old ones that were falling apart, and Finisterre jeans. The entire outfit cost less than one of those items brand new.

I love to read. I like to lose myself in a story and fight my eyelids getting heavy for one more chapter. Thrillers are my go-to but they have a tendency to give my overactive imagination something to latch onto during REM so I pick my battles. I recently read the much talked about Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (over-hyped IMO) and am currently reading an advanced copy of Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune – a best-friends to lovers story, not something I’d usually choose but I am invested. I’m 80% through and so far it’s a solid 5/5.

As much as I enjoy a trip to the park with my nature-loving son, it’s fast become repetitive and making small talk with other parents or apologising when my two-year-old swipes their child’s scooter has started to grate on me. So in January I signed us up to a National Trust membership (£13.50 a month for two adults, I had no idea it was such a bargain) and we’ve started exploring some of our local spots. Jude gets to run free and explore somewhere new, my partner and I get to eat an albeit overpriced yet delicious slice of Victoria sponge and something is usually purchased in the gift shop (last trip: two cast iron mice and a toadstool). Monty, our ten-year-old dachshund, often comes too – and has even ended up at one property where I didn’t check dogs weren’t allowed. Reader, I ended up crying behind the buggy in the car park because I had messed up our trip and we had to go home.

I am currently at a crossroads with my career. I’m 41 in May and for the last decade I’ve been working as a thinking partner for small business owners – part business mentor, part strategist, part life coach. Since coming back from maternity leave in 2025 it’s been harder than it should be, and I find myself pondering a change. I’ll write about that here as I figure it out.

If you’ve read this far and we’ve not met before…

Hi, I’m Sam. I live in Hove, on the South Coast. Which is right next to Brighton. In fact it’s Brighton and Hove. But us Hovians distinguish ourselves from Brightonians. Some might say we’re snobby because the standard answer when someone asks “you live in Brighton, right?” is “Hove, actually.” Personally I just say Hove because that is in fact where I live.

This was just an introduction so you know what you’re getting into if you choose to allow me a little sliver of your inbox. I’ll share when I have something to say – no set cadence, no specific niche, no algorithm to feed. A bit like my (now long-deleted) 2016 Instagram account where I’d share life updates in the caption under pretty photos of places I’d been or things I’d seen and make insta-friends in the comments. I hope to make Substack friends here instead.

Consider this me leaning into the seven-year-old who so badly wanted to be a writer. She’d be delighted. Even if she has swapped the typewriter for the tap-tap-tap of butterfly keys on a MacBook.

Sam x

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