2 Girls 1 Book: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The inaugural Great American Tradwife novel

Welcome back to 2 Girls 1 Book, a monthly cross-post where Ochuko Akpovbovbo and Pandora Sykes chat about a book via Google Docs.

For our twelfth edition, we’re talking about Yesteryear, the debut novel from Caro Claire Burke about a tradwife influencer and mother of six, Natalie Miller, who sells homespun produce (made in China), candid lifestyle videos (cut by a producer), true love (her dumb husband Caleb can’t keep it in his pants) and help-free mothering (two hidden nannies) to an audience of millions, who hate-follow her every move. But one day, Natalie wakes up in 1856. How did she get there? And what happens now that she got what she ostensibly wished for - the true, tradwife experience - and it’s terrible in every conceivable way?

As ever, we’d LOVE to hear from you in the Comments. For those of you who like to read along, later this month (this one is a week late - it should have come out in April!) we will be doing Kin, by Tayari Jones.

Ochuko! Is Yesteryear the most hyped book of 2026?

Yesteryear is absolutely the most hyped book of 2026. Might be just my algorithm but it is everywhere.

No, it’s not just your algorithm. It’s No.1 on The New York Times bestseller list - insane for a debut - and the atuhor just appeared on Seth Myers - again, vanishingly rare for a debut novel from a non-celebrity. I hope Caro Claire Burke is pinching herself, because it’s truly an insane achievement.

Let’s get into it. I want to start with how I felt about the book. Each time I read a book, I write down a rating, which is often subject to change after it’s been digested a bit. On a pure reading-experience level, this was loads of fun! I absolutely sped through it. I love a nasty protagonist, so I really enjoyed being in Natalie’s head, although I was let down by how one-dimensional she seemed to be. Lots of missed opportunities there, but we’ll get back to that. Parts of the middle lagged for me, and I could have done without quite a few bits. I genuinely did not see the end coming, though, so that was delightful. What a twist!

Where I’d rate this book lower, is in the context of what I believe it’s trying to do. I can’t take this seriously as a commentary on tradwife culture because every single character is a caricature—the “bad” ones especially. There is zero nuance in any of them, the motivations are incredibly simplistic, and it’s just not real. You know how we do this thing where we look at people whose lives we disapprove of and go, I bet they are secretly mean and miserable? If I were to read Yesteryear as a commentary on tradwives, that’s what this book would feel like. So I’ve decided not to! What do you think?

I think that this book has an excellent premise and stone cold perfect timing - with all the dialogue around tradwives, and how they intersect with America’s rollback of abortion rights, the resurgence of purity culture, MAHA’s conspiracy theories around birth control - but I agree that I wanted to see more character development. What moved these characters? They were entertaining as hell but it felt purely entertaining.

There’s a lot of chat at the moment about books being written just so that there is some IP to sell to Hollywood - books written to be movies - and what’s interesting about this one, is that Burke has said that while she was writing the book, Anne Hathaway bought it, and then Hathaway helped her finish it, and so this is a book that has been if not written then finished, as a movie. I’m not saying that means it’s bad - it’s not, at all, it’s funny and snarky and clever and timely and I think it will shine as a movie - but I do wonder what the book might have been like without that interruption.

This! The books-to-movie pipeline is so fascinating to me. And I agree - now more than ever, books are being written with IP potential in mind. It’s worth interrogating what that’s doing to literature.

In this case, I think it means you have tons of cinematic moments - I mean you can see this all on screen, can’t you? Hathaway in her pioneer dress with a Joe Alwyn-type Caleb chopping wood nearby - but I did want to see more about why Natalie is a crappy mother. I like seeing terrible mothers in fiction, but why is she a terrible mother, and beyond plot point - or Instagram potential - why did she have six kids, if she hates raising them? Was it just for the content? I just wanted to scratch at that, a bit more. Ditto Caleb. Has he always been a soft boi?

So, I’m Nigerian. My grandmothers had nine and seven children respectively, and while they would both tell me not to do that (!), I do take issue with the framing of large families as inherently abusive. It feels like a uniquely Western lens, one I’m more fascinated by than offended by. Because I find the author incredibly intelligent and articulate, I was really looking forward to seeing that tension explored in the book. I wanted to understand it.

Kids are a lot of work (she says, propping her eyes open with pen lids) but, like you, I don’t see large families as inherently violent or creepy or weird - my mother was one of seven and I’m one of four.

The argument that large families are hard on mothers makes complete sense to me - it’s true. There’s no version of my life where I’m having five kids. But I find the idea that it’s inherently detrimental to the children, to have lots of children, I do find interesting. I have a whole country’s worth of lived experience that suggests otherwise. That’s why I was hoping to come away from the book with a deeper understanding, and I didn’t quite get there. But maybe my expectations were misplaced. It’s probably unfair to expect a cultural manifesto from a novel that wasn’t trying to be one. And to be fair, as a piece of fiction, it was superb.

I’m flipping through the book and landed on a moment where Natalie reminds herself to adjust her expression to something more “normal” while speaking to Shannon. It’s not an isolated instance - there are a few moments like that. Paired with how little genuine warmth she seems to feel toward anyone in her life, or even people she encounters, it makes me wonder if we’re meant to read her as someone with actual behavioural issues.

I feel like we’re just meant to read her as a narcissist? A terrible internet person? It’s sort of amazing to me the ire people reserve for tradwives. Speaking of, Yesteryear is widely interpreted to be a novel about Hannah Neelman, the wildly popular Mormon influencer known as Ballerina Farm. She’s a blonde, beautiful, conservative Christian mother of nine - and a lightning rod for controversy, whether it’s over raw milk or competing in a beauty pageant 12 days after the birth of her 8th child. I started the book thinking it would be a satire of Ballerina Farm, but Natalie mistreats her family so much, and is filled with such violent zeal (she is religious, that part isn’t fake, she notes how much she hates being “waterboarded with modernity” - good phrase - at college) that I wondered if it’s actually based on Ruby Franke? There seems to be more commonality, there.

Because yes it’s about the yearning for all things retro (see: another debut novel, time travel is en vogue) but it’s also about the collusion of the performance of motherhood and child cruelty. So I’d have liked to have seen that explored. And I’d like to have seen a bit more about why these women - like Neelman and Nara Smith - are so appealing, beyond their good looks. Is it because they seem so fecund, and there is still something mystifying about birth, or rather a women who feels able to do it so many times? It’s not just hate. Natalie is powered by hate, and receives in turn hate-follows, but I think there’s more to it.

Natalie didn’t read like a real person. Neither did her husband. And that was a real weakness to the book because nothing real or interesting could be learnt from them. Let’s talk about the other women for a moment. I found Natalie’s decades-long obsession with Reena genuinely hilarious, but also slightly unsettling. What do you think that was really about? I think Reena is a stand in for all of us.

Yeah that was a good pivot, bringing Reena back as the ABC anchor. I liked that. I guess it’s Burke’s way of showing that Natalie longed to be liberated from the life that she had chosen without feeling like she made the choice. Speaking of all of us, what’s the general consensus on Goodreads and BookTok?

Goodreads is overwhelmingly positive, while BookTok feels more mixed - though still largely in its favour. It’s an undeniably fun, pacey read, and in many ways feels genuinely original. More than anything, people seem to be responding to the gotcha of it all.

It’s a good twist!!! I didn’t see that coming. I don’t want to give it away, even though we usually do spoilers, because it’s so pivotal.

I agree, let’s leave it for people reading who haven’t read the book, to discover. I think ultimately, that there are so many more interesting questions here than the book can answer. Maybe that’s the real takeaway: that we don’t fully understand who these women are or why they choose this life, and in that absence of understanding, it becomes easier to project our worst assumptions onto them and treat that as truth.

I think I do actually understand a little about why women might choose this life. I think it’s partly due to rampant ahistorical nostalgia, whereby some people genuinely think things were better back then. Tbf they probably were better days for some men, pure warrior cave man stuff, but they sure as hell weren’t for women. And the novel does show, albeit vaguely, how much it sucks to be a pioneer woman - things are scratchy and itchy and painful and the household labour is exhausting. But I think there’s something more subtle about this righteous individual, now. You know what does explore that desire - and how that desire curdles - very well? The Real Lives of Mormon Housewives! It is the richest text. Let me just sneak a lil trailer in here…

Hahaha you are obsessed, I can vouch for this. I also found myself wanting more from the past sections. I understand why they had to be more contained, but each one felt slightly cut short. I kept wanting a deeper look at her relationship with the kids in particular - there was something there that never quite got fully developed. And I might be misreading this, but was there a shift where she suddenly started enjoying sex with her husband?

Yes! Because he was rough with her! He wasn’t ‘feminised’, like he was in the present day. He was in control…. and abusive. Which I think is interesting: Natalie thinks she wants to be this all-powerful influencer, but she ends up losing all respect for her husband. And then in 1856, that flips…

That actually makes it even more confusing. He was manhandling her, he hit her, there was no affection - nothing that would suggest intimacy. And then we’re told he could barely perform before? It completely pulled me out of the book. The whole turkey baster, no-sex setup was wild.

I don’t think she wants intimacy. I think she wants dirty hot sex. She wants to see her husband as someone… dangerous. Not someone she can bend and whittle to her grid’s advantage.

Just to do a swerve, Caro Claire Burke, wrote a brilliant piece for The Guardian, about the tradwife:

“The tradwife did not “become popular” at a time when women were, as so many have claimed, at a breaking point in trying to manage their work and personal lives. The tradwife came after the women had already been broken” - [italics mine]. “By the time Nara Smith was making homemade bubblegum in couture, and Hannah Neeleman was competing in a pageant 12 days after her eighth birth, the wage gap had been stalled since 2002, and the childcare crisis, which had been quietly bleeding women for decades, shifted into full hemorrhage.”

She also notes - and this is so interesting:

“Following the election that handed Donald Trump his first term, The Handmaid’s Tale surged in popularity, and would eventually sell 3m copies over the next two years.”

I follow the author on social media, and she’s great - sharp, thoughtful, very precise in how she articulates things. She recently shared that she’d spent the better part of a decade being rejected by publishers, and that this is her big break.

That series of screenshots she posted, like 20 e-mail rejections in a row? That was generous of her to share that, so helpful for budding young writers.

And what a break to have! Sometimes it really is about timing as much as talent, and this feels like the rare moment where both align. It also feels, in retrospect, like a build-up. She found her audience on TikTok through her tradwife commentary, and the book lands almost as an extension of that - like the long-form version of a conversation she’s been having for years. A perfect storm, not just for her, but for readers who wanted this moment captured and interpreted. Which is probably why I’m placing so much weight on it. I keep coming back to the same question: will this be the book people read years from now to understand this moment?

Oh man, I am so intrigued to see how we think of tradwives full stop, in 10 years! Will the term still exist? Will there be a gazillion of them? Will they still be as popular as ever? We’re in a feminist backlash right now, but I think when the culture swings back around again, tradwives might take a hit. Last question for you: will you be watching the movie?

You bet I will! I’m sure I’ll love it even more, then.