My Rating: ★★★★★

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is the kind of novel that announces exactly what it is from page one — sharp, unsettling, and not particularly interested in letting you off the hook — and somehow still manages to gut you by the end. I am a fantastically frugal reader who never buys books.

Buy this book.

Reader beware — spoilers are ahead!

The Book

When I first read the premise, I braced for something flat — a tidy pan on tradwives, every reader closing the cover feeling correct about her politics and clean about her judgment.

That is not what this is.

Burke gives her narrator Natalie Heller Mills — a Christian tradwife influencer with millions of followers — enough room to be observant, funny, and alarmingly, more often than I was prepared for, correct. She is not a cartoon villain. She is something more dangerous: a woman who is very, very good at reading a room.

Natalie has the brand deals, the nannies, the young producer Shannon documenting her supposedly effortless life. She is, by every metric the internet has invented, winning. Then she wakes up in 1855 — no phone, four children in homespun clothing calling her Mama, and a man who looks like a harder, older version of her husband ordering her inside.

The novel alternates between the disoriented 1855 present and the backstory of how the empire was built and how it came apart: a useless charming husband, a senator father-in-law with deeply sinister fine print, and Shannon — who eventually goes on television to expose Natalie not just as a fraud but as someone who assaulted her. The twist, when it arrives, is earned and devastating: Natalie and Caleb built the pioneer world themselves. After the scandal destroyed everything, they stripped the ranch of all modernity and raised their youngest children in a fabricated nineteenth-century homestead — and over the years, Natalie’s mind fractured until she genuinely forgot she had built her own prison.

Book Club Discussions

• The Twist

  • didn’t see it coming and found a poetic justice in the psychotic break — though she’d been half-expecting Doug to have stowed Natalie in 1855 to clean up his mess, which is very royal family x Diana conspiracy (and I, of course, adore).

  • also suspected modern exile at Doug’s hand and felt the reveal came twenty or thirty pages too late. I, too, felt the ending was a titch too rushed and tidy, breaking from the cadence of the rest of the novel.

  • had sensed something was off from the moment Natalie arrived in 1855 with no memory of how she got there — no stones to touch à la Outlander — and suspected a mental institution reveal. When the truth landed, she was still in awe of how thoroughly Natalie had treated her own children as props.

  • My favorite related thread: I asked what it says about Natalie — and about all of us — that her first theory upon waking in 1855 is that she’s being filmed. Surveillance felt more plausible to her than anything supernatural. had the answer: it was Natalie’s mother who told her to always pretend she was being watched, and her belief that God was always watching primed her perfectly to live in front of a camera. The performance didn’t start with Instagram. It started in the Church.

• The Shannon Of It All

  • Shannon’s television interview, the assault allegation, what Natalie’s narration can and cannot name — was our most divided conversation.

  • wasn’t ready to let Shannon fully off the hook, noting that Shannon cosplayed as underprivileged and innocent and asking the pointed question: how did Natalie not have her sign an NDA?

  • read Shannon’s testimony as possibly shaped and amplified by her team — and since Natalie blacks out frequently and her narration can’t name what she did, Paige suspects something even more damning may be buried under the psychotic break.

  • I believe this is a larger allegory of what social media is: we only see the parts of the stories the creator wants us to see. Unsavory or undesired facts can be neatly hidden away from the phone’s camera — even from the creator’s own consciousness, it appears.

• The Grocery Bagger Irony

  • An irony I keep returning to: early in the novel, Natalie is ashamed her sister became a grocery bagger — she sees it as the ultimate failure, the life that proves you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t perform well enough. By the end, Natalie’s own daughter Mary is a grocery bagger, as a direct result of the childhood Natalie engineered for her. The thing she feared most, she manufactured herself. Burke doesn’t underline it; she just tosses it out there. But it landed like a stone on a smooth lake to me.

• The Indictment

  • When I asked who the book was really indicting, the conversation went somewhere more interesting than I expected. Because the honest answer isn’t just Natalie, and it isn’t just the audience that made her — it’s the false war we’ve been fighting for decades between the tradwife and the working woman, as though these are opposing tribes rather than two expressions of the same impossible pressure.

  • put it perfectly: the tradwife/angry woman Venn diagram is more of a circle than the characters think. Both are unhappy, unfulfilled, overwhelmed, trying to meet expectations that were never designed to be met. Both are, in her words, key offenders of girl-on-girl crime. The women in Natalie’s Harvard cohort who rolled their eyes at domesticity weren’t free — they were just performing a different kind of correctness. Natalie, performing the opposite, wasn’t free either. Neither camp is the enemy. Both are exhausted. Both are watching the other and wondering if they chose wrong. Veer too far toward either extreme, said, and you’ll literally lose your mind.

  • Burke never states this thesis outright. She just builds two timelines, populates them with women making impossible choices, and lets you arrive there yourself.

Want to participate in the book club discussion? It’s never too late! Keep the conversation going in The Lauren Letter Book Club May Note below!

On Reading This as Someone Who Lives Online

There is an undercurrent to reading Yesteryear as an online creator that I didn’t anticipate, and I think it’s worth naming. It’s the discomfort of looking into one of those mirrors that flips your reflection around. Still you — but something is wrong, and you can’t quite shake it.

Natalie is not a character I recognize in myself. But the mechanics of what she built — the careful curation, the gap between the woman on screen and the woman off it, the way the audience becomes both your product and your captor — those I can recognize acutely in the influencer space. What this book asks, with a very sharp knife, is what happens when the performance outlasts the performer’s belief in it. When you’ve posted so many mornings that you can no longer tell if you love them, or if you’ve just loved how they looked in the light.

That question doesn’t belong only to tradwives!!!

If You Liked Yesteryear, May I Recommend:

Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza

If Yesteryear cracked something open about the distance between the life we sell and the life we live, this walks directly into that fissure. Same nerve, different form.

June Book Club: Cast Your Vote!

• Famesick by Lena Dunham A memoir tracing Dunham’s rise from Girls to the present, asking the question she spent a decade trying to answer: what has the cost of fulfilling her dreams really been, and was it worth it?

• Into the Blue by Emma Brodie A decade-spanning love story set against the world of improvisational theater, following two people whose connection refuses to resolve itself neatly across years of bad timing and longing. A Reese’s Book Club pick.

• June Baby by Shannon Garvey A debut novel set on Block Island, following Ruth — sent to the island at seventeen after her mother’s death — who must now reckon, years later, with the first love and life she left behind there. Beach book with more depth than romance, salt air, and gorgeous prose.

P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.

Share

I finished Yesteryear and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I am fizzing. I am foaming at the mouth, actually. I have Thoughts with a capital T and nowhere near enough people in my immediate vicinity who have read it yet — which is where you come in.

This month’s The Lauren Letter Book Club is officially open for business, and I want to yap. I want to hear your theories, your reactions, the moment you gasped or laughed or put the book down and stared at the ceiling.

I’ve put together a set of discussion based questions (“DBQs”) in my original Substack announcement (see below!). I’ll be reading every single one and weaving them into the end-of-month post so it feels like we actually sat down together. And, of course, it’s never too late to become a reader!

P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.

Share

March’s reading list felt like being dropped into the interiors of other people’s lives — marriages, friendships, families, ambitions — sometimes deliciously, sometimes uncomfortably, but always with a kind of closeness that made it hard to look away.

It began with Broken Country, a slow burn that nevertheless became insatiable. I found myself genuinely excited to return to it each night, and as a book club pick, it was one of those rare unanimous wins that we all tore through.

Homeschooled was undeniably fascinating and unflinchingly open, but where you hope for some catharsis or clarity in a survival story, I found myself instead filled with unresolved frustration. I found the memoir to feel at times more like anecdotes of growing up with a narcissistic mother and less than a true story of transformation or growth.

Then came a complete tonal shift with Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, which I was clinically obsessed with. Irreverent, insightful, and imaginative, it struck that perfect balance of humor and vulnerability — I laughed, I cried, I paused to think. It felt like both a conversation and a mirror, the kind of book you underline and immediately want to gift.

Fictional delight for anglophiles showed up in Royal Spin — fizzy, fun, and smart, and exactly what you want if you love the world of The Royal We, the behind-the-scenes intrigue of From the Corner of the Oval, and the charm of Emily Henry. It’s the literary equivalent of champagne at Afternoon Tea— light, sparkling, but still thoughtfully done! Plus, it’s co-authored by a real member of the Royal Rota, Omid Scobie!

Other reads leaned more introspective. I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen opens with the author’s admission that the life she lives and the topics discussed within the book are incredibly privileged, but she is refreshingly honest about a life of keeping up with the Joneses in a way that feels disarming rather than performative. And Strangers: A Memoir offered a kind of scrumptious voyeurism — an intimate, layered reflection on marriage that at times felt like an Elin Hilderbrand character come to life: coastal, affluent, but grounded in emotional rawness.

And then there was A Death in Diamonds — the one I wanted to love most, and the fourth installment in the Her Majesty Investigates series (essentially fan-fic of Queen Elizabeth II solving mysteries!). A young Queen Elizabeth II solving a murder and political sabotage in 1957 should have been a guaranteed success for me. And while the palace details and royal atmosphere delivered, the reading experience didn’t. It felt like a slog — too many characters, an unclear central mystery, and shifting storylines that made it difficult to stay invested. Even as an ardent royal watcher, I found myself close to giving up multiple times, which pains me to admit.

Taken together, March was less about easy enjoyment and more about immersion — books that pulled me in, whether through delight, discomfort, or sheer inability to look away. Some I devoured, some I wrestled with, but all of them demanded a reaction.

Without further adieu, here are the rankings for the books I read in March 2026.

P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.

Share

My love affair with reading began since my days of hooked on phonics. And it has been the most constant thread running through every version of my life—before careers, before marriage, before adulthood. Like a good perfume or catchy song, the books I have devoured are now tucked into every milestone and memory.

Over time—through school, work, and life becoming fuller and faster—I’ve had to be much more intentional about keeping reading in my days. What used to happen effortlessly now happens by design. I still get through about 50-60 books a year, but it’s not without diligence!

These are the habits, systems, and small shifts that have allowed me to stay a voracious reader—and I believe they can help you become one, too.

P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.

Subscribe now

How to Become a Voracious Reader

1. Treat Reading Like a Muscle

The most important mindset shift: reading isn’t a personality trait—it’s a skill. And like any skill, it strengthens with repetition.

Law school (and later, my early years in Big Law) forced me into a kind of reading boot camp—processing dense, technical material for hours on end. What surprised me most was how quickly that stamina translated into reading for pleasure.

If you feel “out of practice,” that’s all it is.

You don’t have inability. Just atrophy.

The fastest way to become a voracious reader is simply to start—consistently, imperfectly, and often.

2. Make It a Non-Negotiable Part of Your Day

The easiest way to read more is to stop treating it as optional.

Anchor it to something you already do—most naturally, your wind-down routine.

For me, reading is the final exhale of my day. It’s the moment my brain understands: we are done now. I reach for my book the way someone else might reach for a glass of wine or turn on a show.

Because it’s tied to going to sleep, I don’t have to decide whether I’m going to read. It simply happens.

Even 15–20 minutes a night adds up quickly. And once it becomes part of your rhythm, the volume takes care of itself.

3. Protect the Ritual

Once you’ve set your time to curl up with a book, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, block off your calendar, and protect this small pocket of quiet.

Reading doesn’t compete well with notifications—it needs a little ceremony, and all of your attention.

4. Make It Easy (and Inexpensive)

The easier and cheaper it is, the more you’ll read. Friction is the enemy! I utilize these resources to help keep costs low:

• Library — My personal favorite. All the excitement of shopping, without having to spend a dollar!

• Library e-reader apps (Libby/Hoopla) — A best-kept secret! Many libraries are affiliated with apps like Libby or Hoopla where you can rent digital versions of books without having to leave your couch.

• BookBub — A daily digest of deals tailored to your wishlist or recommendations based off your reading. I love adding want-to-read-but-not-in-a-rush titles, and then snagging them once a deal pops up!

• Book of the Month — For a low price, you receive a curated choice of selections from best-sellers, burgeoning authors, and first releases! And, if the monthly picks aren’t to your fancy, you can always defer your credit. Plus, you get “add-on” privileges, which allows you to access BOTM’s large catalogue of popular titles at a significant discount! Picking my book each month feels like SUCH a treat!

• Kindle Unlimited — While I ultimately decided to cancel my subscription, I know so many people who adore the access to thousands of titles a month for less than the price of one book.

5. Buy a Kindle

I know. E-readers are controversial and balked at by purists. But if your goal is volume and consistency, nothing compares.

It removes barriers—no lighting issues, no bulk, instant access—and turns reading into something you can do anywhere. Mine lives in whatever bag I’m carrying (and small enough to fit into my everyday clutch), so I can quickly pull out when waiting for an appointment or a friend to meet up.

6. Track What You Read

There is something so powerful about seeing your literary life accumulate. And, it taps into the same psychology that James Clear’s Atomic Habits teaches: what gets tracked gets repeated. You’ll also have access at your fingertips to what you want to pick-up next!

• Use Goodreads

• Follow friends (including me!)

• Set a realistic annual goal

7. Listen to Audiobooks

They count. Fully!!!

Commutes, walks, getting ready, cleaning—these are all hidden reading pockets. Once you start stacking them, you’ll be shocked at how quickly you move through books. I like to listen to non-fiction books, especially. Plus, did you know Spotify has audiobooks for immediate listening as part of its Premium Plan?

8. Read Multiple Books at Once

This is an underrated trick! I always am reading a fiction title and listening to a non-fiction audiobook.

9. Call Yourself a Reader

Not “someone trying to read more.” Not “someone who used to read.” A reader.

No one is going to hand you a certificate. There’s no threshold you have to cross, no number of books you need to earn the title. You get to decide.

And more often than not, we rise (or fall) to the level of the identities we claim. When you start to see yourself as a reader, your habits begin to align accordingly. You reach for a book instead of your phone. You bring one with you without thinking. You finish more than you start.

So say it—I’m a reader.

And then, little by little, make it true.

The Books That Will Help You Do It

• If You Want a Beach Read — Anything by Elin Hilderbrand

  • My all-time favorite author. I savor her works, tucking them away for summertime only like a special seasonal treat (the only exceptions being The Academy, which she wrote with her daughter and is set in the fall; the Winter Street Inn series, set at Christmastime; and the Winter in Paradise series, set around New Years).

• If You Want to Fall in Love with a Series — The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

  • Deliciously British and charming, you will be ready to reach for the next installment as you are turning your final page on its predecessor.

• If You Want to Fall in Love with an Author — The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  • TJR can build a world and enrapture you right within it.

• If You Want Multiple Points of View — The Authenticity Project or Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, both by Clare Pooley

  • Clare Pooley’s novels are multi-generational and sprawl across economic, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. You will leave each session with a newfound appreciation for the stories of those who quietly surround you.

• If You Want Your Heart Warmed — The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher

  • This was a completely random and impulsive pick-up from the library, and I think about it at least once a week since I finished it over 18-months ago.

• If You Want to Feel Slightly Voyeuristic — Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

  • This book inserts you into the real-life affluence of a Elin Hilderbrand novel, weaving between New York City and Martha’s Vineyard. It also is a quick read at ~240 pages!

• If You Want a Memoir — The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos

  • Another book I have thought about constantly since finishing. I loved listening to this as an audiobook, since every chapter was about ~45 minutes and focused a different patient’s story. It felt like a podcast!

• If You Want to Be on the Edge-of-Your-Seat —The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

  • I could not put this book down! I picked it up last year during an evening snowstorm that kept us homebound, and I stayed up until 1am finishing it!

• If You Want to Laugh — The Guncle by Steven Rowley or How Do I Un-Remember This by Danny Pellegrino

  • The Guncle (and its sequel)will have you laughing one page and unexpectedly tearing up the next—warm, witty, and full of heart.

  • Anything by Danny Pellegrino is guaranteed joy, especially his first publication. As one of my all-time favorite podcasters, his books capture that same irreverent, observant humor—so much so that I have genuinely laughed out loud in public more than once.

• If You Want Historical Fiction — The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

  • A sweeping, emotional story set in World War II that follows two sisters navigating survival, resistance, and impossible choices in Nazi-occupied France. It’s immersive, deeply moving, and stays with you.

• If You Want to Read Before the Movie — The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

  • Set at a summer camp, this book blends mystery, family dynamics, and class tensions into a slow-burning, atmospheric read.

• If You Want to Savor Something — Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

  • It’s quiet, reflective, and deeply human—the kind of novel that makes you look forward to your time with it. Less about urgency, more about presence. And that, very much, is the point.

• If You Want Essays — Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

  • Sharp, witty, and deeply relatable, this essay collection reads like a conversation with your smartest, funniest friend. It’s perfectly suited for dipping in and out—little vignettes on love, friendship, and growing up that feel both personal and universal.

• If You Want Poetry — A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush

  • Modern and instantly recognizable, Rush’s collection capture smalls, specific experiences and emotions with surprising clarity.

• If You’re Newly Engaged or Married (or Have Been for a While!) — How to Be Married by Jo Piazza

  • Part memoir, part global exploration, this follows a journalist navigating her first year of marriage while facing a multiple sclerosis diagnosis—and simultaneously traveling the world to understand how different cultures define partnership. It’s thoughtful, perspective-shifting, and one I’ve gifted to countless friends after reading on my own honeymoon.

If February had a thesis, it was this: aging is not a slow fade — it’s a sharpened edge.

My month began with a Libby hold I had been waiting on for eons: How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley. I adore Pooley, so my anticipation was high — perhaps too high. I’ll admit, I nearly gave it two stars. At times the antics of her septuagenarian cast felt slightly overworked. But then I reached her author’s note — her insistence that she wanted to write older characters who are not bumbling, not helpless, not background noise — and something shifted. The novel became less about plot mechanics and more about reclamation. Aging, in her hands, is mischievous and strategic and very much alive.

That theme echoed beautifully as I revisited my favorite fictional retirees in The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman — the third installment in The Thursday Murder Club. This series remains one of my absolute favorites I’ve ever discovered. Equal parts mystery and meditation on aging, Osman’s characters are charming, amusing, and quietly profound. They solve cold cases, yes — but they also wrestle with loss, relevance, loyalty, and time. Each return to Coopers Chase feels like a warm hug and cuppa.

Nonfiction joined the conversation, too. Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy by Chris Duffy explores the scientific basis of humor and the measurable ways laughter benefits us personally, professionally, and intellectually. What lingered with me most wasn’t a punchline, but a posture: humor as noticing. Humor as curiosity. The simple act of listening more closely — even to the stranger across from you on a subway — as a pathway to connection. In a month so centered on aging, this felt like an instruction manual for staying nimble: remain curious, remain amused, remain open.

And then there was Dianaworld: An Obsession by Edward White — unflinching, occasionally contrarian, and deeply analytical in its study of Princess Diana. At times the critique feels almost differently critical for the sake of it, but that tension is part of the point. The book is less a straightforward biography and more an examination of obsession — how a single woman became a cultural mirror for longing, grievance, romance, and myth. For a Royal enthusiast, it’s rich with factual (and occasionally theoretical) nuggets. But beyond that, it’s about narrative — who controls it, who projects onto it, and what survives when the person at the center is gone.

Without further adieu, here are the rankings for the books I read in February 2026.

This month’s reading stack felt like an evening spent by candelight and without disruption: British villages with secrets, kitchens humming with warmth, family dynamics crackling just beneath the surface, and the kind of stories that feel indulgent without ever tipping into excess. There was murder (quite a bit of it!), memoir, merriment, and more than one moment of laughing out loud while reading alone—which I consider the highest compliment.

I spent several evenings tucked into the A Most Unusual Demise series by Katherine Black—quintessentially British, warmly familiar, and unexpectedly dark, with a charming village cast that belies just how sinister things can get beneath the surface. That sense of coziness was softened by Jump and Find Joy, a gentle collection of vignettes from Hoda Kotb’s life and career. Family drama entered the mix with Seven Days of Us, a tender, sharp portrait of a family forced into close quarters—very The Family Stone, but set against the wintry calm of a British country home. I laughed out loud more than once while reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens, newly discovering Ina Garten not just as an iconic hostess but as a genuinely funny, self-aware storyteller with impeccable timing. And finally, I closed the month with The Christmas Eve Murders—a festive whodunit that leans a touch Scooby-Doo in its theatrics, but does so with such charm and holiday spirit that you can’t help but go along for the ride.

Without further adieu, here are the rankings for the books I read in December 2025.

November’s reading stack was rich and layered—equal parts political intrigue, historical endeavor, luxurious industry gossip, and delightfully clever mystery. Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed delivered a sharp, unsettling look at the shadows of the Kennedy legacy, while Sunrise on the Reaping swept me up with its rich, luminous storytelling. The Winter Guest was, admittedly, a miss for me, but The Frozen River revived the month with its blend of gripping narrative and inspirational history-telling. I rounded things out with Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, an incisive peek behind the curtain of the luxury world, and The Man Who Died Twice, which remained as witty and effortlessly charming as ever (I adore this series!). Altogether, November unfolded as a month of big themes, bold stories, and deeply rewarding reads.

Without further adieu, here are the rankings for the books I read in November 2025.

October’s reading list turned out to be the perfect blend of cozy, clever, and reflective. Between witchy warmth, time-bending suspense, and a dash of memoir magic, I found myself completely immersed—whether it was brewing tea with The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, unraveling fate in Wrong Place Wrong Time, or rethinking my routines with Atomic Habits. The Third Gilmore Girl offered a nostalgic peek behind the curtain of a TV classic, while Weyward swept me into a generational tale of resilience and reclamation. Together, these five reads made for a month that felt both restorative and electric—exactly what October should be.

Without further adieu, here are the rankings for the books I read in October 2025.