What happens when a tradwife has to put her money where her mouth is

Yesteryear, the buzzy new debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has the kind of premise it’s hard to look away from: A tradwife influencer named Natalie — a Harvard dropout who married rich at 20 — wakes up in 1855. Gone are her tastefully discrete appliances, her prized collection of luxury sweaters, her team of nannies and farm workers. In their place: an outhouse, stained homespun prairie dresses, and hours of back-breaking labor spent washing a single load of laundry with homemade lye soap.

Natalie, confronted with this brave old world, does a lot of crying. Things get especially rough for her after she tries to escape, stumbles into a bear trap, badly injures her leg, and then has to cope with 19th-century pioneer medicine. The medicinal ointment “smells like bacon grease,” and there’s no anesthetic for the stitches, so that, Natalie tells us, “it feels like my body has depleted a month’s worth of energy from the mere translation of so many nerve signals screaming EMERGENCY to my brain.”