Book: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Reviewed by plotdrunk
Rating: 5/5
This completely surprised me and ended up being one of the more thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. Going in, I thought I was getting something like speculative fiction with a light sprinkle of fantasy with a trad wife seemingly transported back to the 1850s. Instead, this turned into something much darker and more layered, becoming a commentary on motherhood, womanhood, religion, and social media culture. I loved how much ambiguity the book held onto for so long, which kept me off-balance and constantly questioning what was real. The pace and tension throughout the whole book was relentless, and it made it impossible to put down.
The FMC is fascinatingly unlikeable, but she is written with enough complexity that she never felt flat or cartoonish to me. I found her to be frustrating, annoying, and tragic, but also deeply relatable (especially her struggles with motherhood and identity). The twist was incredible, not because it was shocking for the sake of being shocking, but because it completely recontextualized the story in a way that made it even sadder.
Once everything clicks into place, so much of story took on completely different emotional weight, and that was what really elevated this for me.
For all of the book’s commentary and psychological tension, what lingered most was how heartbreaking it is, especially when you think about what all of this means for her children. At the end of the day, she is a deeply, deeply unwell mother who was shaped by a repressive culture, and then repeated all of those cycles with her own family to the point that she had a mental break to escape the reality she built with her own two hands.
Overall, this felt incredibly smart, unsettling, and original. It is very much in my wheelhouse in some ways and completely outside of it in others, which made it even more enjoyable. It’s rare that a book feels both intellectually interesting and emotionally devastating, but this did. Easy five stars.