by Caro Claire Burke

Published: 2026

Genre: Psychological Thriller / Dark Fiction

“An influencer’s perfect old-fashioned dream curdles into secrets, fear, and something much harder to escape.”

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I ended up giving this 5 stars. At first, I thought this was going to be more of a 3 or 3.5 star read for me. The trad-wife, homemaking, and motherhood parts didn’t immediately pull me in. But once I hit about the one-third mark, the book turned on for me.

What made this click was how strongly it started to remind me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Frankenstein, Victor creates something he thinks he can control, then abandons responsibility for it once it becomes too powerful, too ugly, and too real. That is exactly how I read Natalie’s public life in Yesteryear.

Natalie creates her own monster: the perfect trad-wife image, the loyal audience, the fake nostalgia, the family-values fantasy, the public version of perfect motherhood. She pieces it together out of lies, branding, performance, and people’s need to believe in a simpler world. At first, that monster gives her power, money, attention, and identity. Then it comes alive.

Like Frankenstein’s creature, the thing Natalie creates eventually turns back on her. The audience that once worshipped her becomes the mob. The public feels like it owns her, her children, her motherhood, and her punishment. She built a life so public that when the monster turned, there was nowhere left to hide.

That correlation with Frankenstein is what pushed this into 5-star territory for me. Yesteryear isn’t just about a fake internet homemaker. It’s about creating a story so powerful that it stops belonging to you. Natalie’s dream collapses because it was always a nightmare with better branding.