Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The Stepford Pioneer

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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Yesteryear is the debut novel of Caro Claire Burke, and is centred on a delightfully fiendish “what if”. What if a popular American tradwife influencer one day found herself living in actual pioneer times? Such a simple conceit, and yet so thoroughly engaging. So it pains me to say: this book completely squanders its brilliant premise. I really loved the setup, following Natalie, a woman pretending to be the perfect housewife while hiding nannies, microwaves, pesticides and farmhands juuuust out of frame. I should have […]

Well gosh darn, dang it all to heck

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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We all know the trend: young women deliberately turning their backs on the modern world and cosplaying the rural homesteading lifestyle, where they grow their own veggies, bake their own bread, butcher their own chickens and make their own clothing. The lifestyle is then perfectly captured on social media, with carefully curated pictures of blond children in gingham dresses and cowboy boots, and posts that are clearly political in nature masked as just-asking-questions. Comments on social media posts split themselves between admiration and vitriol, and […]

Diary of a Mad Tradwife

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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First and foremost, we must give credit where credit is due. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear has a premise that must have other authors fuming with jealousy. Her protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a housewife and mother on a remote ranch who posts “tradwife” content on social media, pretending to be the ideal American mother while playing down the fact that she has two nannies and a lot of family money from her in-laws to help. One day, she wakes up in what feels like an alternate […]

I Would Not Survive in 1855…And I Wouldn’t Want To

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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We meet bright, but cold Natalie Heller as she goes off to Harvard. Instead of experiencing the world, making friends and learning, the experience shows her that what she knows is “right” and that the world is wicked. She meets a man, a man who’s family is wealthy and heavily connected to politics and she sees in him someone she can mold and make the perfect husband. They quickly marry and things immediately go downhill. Natalie loathes her husband. He has no ambition, he wants […]

Could Not Stop Reading It

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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Rating: 4.5 In a nutshell: Natalie is a tradwife influencer with five kids and one on the way. She lives on a farm and posts on social media about her life (keeping the two nannies and many farmhands off screen, of course). One morning she wakes up and finds herself still on the farm, but her children are different and it appears to be some time in the 1800s. Is she dreaming? Is she part of some sort of reality show? What is happening? Best […]



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