I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke in June, keen to get my own take on the book that everyone is talking about this summer. This is such a clever concept – taking the Trad Wife influencer and transporting her back to the time she purports to emulate to see what it’s really like. That’s what happens to protagonist Natalie, whose perfect world is not all it seems.

Natalie’s pre-influencer world turns out to be a Christian upbringing but with a College experience thrown-in, where she presents us with a choice between a future as the unhappy Feminists trying to have it all with a career, marriage and children and failing at it all, or dropping out for contentment as a homemaker and home-schooler, living on a farm, growing your own food and cooking it all from scratch.

Except Natalie is deeply unhappy in her marriage to vacuous Caleb, a bored rich kid who can’t settle to anything as his father goes on Presidential run after Presidential run, his mother living in a pilled-up haze. Natalie is the brains of the operation and takes charge after battling through postnatal depression and working out how to make the best of a bad situation. Far from the image she presents to her thousands of online followers is her true world of mod cons, hidden out of view of the cameras, nannies to bring up the children and trips to Target to take part in the consumerism she rails against.

So imagine her horror when she finds herself back in time, with the awful reality of life on a homestead in the middle of nowhere in 1800s America.

This book absolutely fulfils its promise, going far beyond being a clever concept to a clever and twisty comic thriller that leaves you on the edge of your seat. A must-read indeed.