June 5, 2026

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

When I first heard about Yesteryear in February from a friend who was reading an early copy, the premise didn’t compel me—a tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to actually live the life she pantomimes, nary a washing machine to be seen. Neat idea, bro, but it sounds a bit like Back to the Future III, which had been my least favourite of the trilogy, so no thank you. I’ve already read Laura Ingalls Wilder. And even when the novel had become legitimately buzzy, I still wasn’t bothered—until I discerned that the buzz was so incredibly divisive. Readers were loving this book, and readers were hating this book, and readers were apparently flummoxed by “the twist,” which I managed to learn nothing about, avoiding the discourse entirely.

I didn’t REALLY want to read Yesteryear, however, until I couldn’t get it, the last copy at Blue Heron Books sold right under my nose at Canadian Independent Bookstore Day and for a while after that, it was out of stock everywhere, so when I saw it again, I grabbed a copy at once. (Scarcity! Such a powerful drug.)

Readers, I loved this book. And I kept waiting for that twist everybody was talking about, but it never came, and I realized that some readers must have supposed they were reading a much more straightforward book than this one, a book where problems are resolved and there’s only just a single hinge, but this is a more complicated project, one that might warrant as many pages of explanation as Pa’s whatnot got in By the Shores of Silver Lake. There are layers of meaning here, and it’s not simply a send-up or satire of influencer culture, instead its own fictional creation, a statement on so many things but also remarkable for more than just simply what it’s “about.” It’s a troubling, uncomfortable, uneasy read, but I absolutely mean that as a compliment.