'Yesteryear’ Exposes the Horror Hiding Inside the Tradwife Fantasy

Published Jul 21, 2026, 6:43 PM EDT Erin is a Books & Literature Writer for Collider. She received her MA in English at LSU New Orleans, where she specialized in Disability Studies and maximized her Gothic literature obsession. She once aspired to be a ghost hunter, but has now settled into the writer’s life. A Pushcart-nominated poet and proud Piscean, if she’s not feverishly writing, you can find her stress baking, swimming, and adding to her tarot card deck collection. Since the start of 2026, three major publishing houses (Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and HarperCollins) have put out thriller novels with the term “tradwife” in the title. Authors Sarah Langan, Saratoga Schaefer, and Michelle Brandon are behind these stories, fueling an emergent subgenre of suspense novels indebted to classics like Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. This rapid influx of identically-titled thriller books speaks to the persistent marketability of tradwife-tagged content today, particularly that which looks to peel back the idyllic guise of this particular specimen of social media stardom. The burgeoning literary embodiments of tradwives piggyback on the post-2020 boom of the influencer fiction subgenre. Interrogating authenticity, fame, performance, and obsession, influencer fiction has produced an array of satirical novels, contemporary romance, and murder mystery page-turners in recent years. Notably, Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice and Leigh Stein’s If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You drop influencer protagonists into Gothic, secret-laden, even outright haunted, homes. This is where today's tradwife thriller novel, too, settles down, treating the curated domestic momfluencer life as the perfect setup for psychological suspense and a springboard for body horror. The standing challenge for this subset of thriller novels, however, lies in balancing the deployment of tradwifery for sensational plot fodder with more nuanced social commentary and critique of the patriarchal system that powers it. The Domestic Thriller Has Found a New Muse Image via Paramount The tradwife character naturally fits into the plot arc of most domestic thrillers, which work to uncover a secret, sinister underbelly of scenic suburban life. Marriage, motherhood, and class are key themes in this genre, most popular for Big Little Lies-style gossip and murder. The introduction of the contemporary tradwife updates this genre's typical narrative backdrop; the small town abode with a white picket fence now gives way to sprawling farm compounds and family brands. Instead of routine grocery store trips, the tradwife character can be found making everything from scratch with one arm while holding a baby in the other. Caro Claire Burke’s debut, Yesteryear, is the most effective novel yet at capturing the hypocrisy, deception, and danger in this homesteading fantasy broadcast to millions. In Yesteryear, readers are dropped into the inner world of Natalie Heller Mills, a tradwife influencer who prides herself on perfection. Yet, her perfect on-screen persona of effortless pastoral domesticity only succeeds, we discover, through the behind-the-scenes work of farmhands, hired nannies, and social media producers who steward her online empire. Her husband cosplays as a cowboy but is actually the incompetent scion of an ultra-wealthy political dynasty. There are industrial-grade fridges and modern kitchen equipment just out of the camera frame. This duplicity is already primed for satire, but the novel’s inciting incident really sets the stage for exposing the tradwife gimmick. In a nutshell, Natalie appears to mysteriously wake up in 1855 to the not-so-dreamy, rugged homesteading frontier she was simulating online to her 8 million followers. In other words, she has to put her money where her mouth is. It’s one heck of a plot pitch and, thus, unsurprising that even before its publication in April, Amazon MGM Studios had already secured rights to a screen adaptation with Anne Hathaway set to produce and star in the film. This will not be the first book-to-screen domestic thriller that Hathaway has taken on. Hathaway recently starred as a 1960s suburban housewife opposite Jessica Chastain in Mother’s Instinct in 2024. The Tradwife is a Different Sort of Antiheroine Image via 20th Century Studios Most book reviews of Yesteryear liken its protagonist, Natalie Mills, to Amy Dunne of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. While both women serve as unreliable, narcissistic narrators (and they both have cheating husbands), they are not the same type of female antiheroine at heart. This much is clear from each character’s audience reception. Both positive and negative commentary on Yesteryear are quick to note that Natalie is a viciously unlikable character. She’s so loathsome, in fact, that the novel as a whole keeps getting propped up as an example of "ragebait literature." Conversely, Amy Dunne, with all her scheming included, is a well-beloved femme fatale. You don’t have to look very long to find an Amy Dunne apologist on the internet. With Gone Girl being such an esteemed modern classic, every unhinged female protagonist post-2012 tends to be measured against Amy Dunne. Understandably so. That “cool girl” monologue still endures as an unflinching callout of performative femininity in service of male fantasies. As a female antihero, Amy Dunne dismantles the "cool girl" complex and undertakes a revenge-driven quest. Natalie Mills' character stands in a much more complicated position. She is not seeking revenge for maltreatment or trying to assert dominance in a marriage or any male-dominated system. Her power through wealth and influence exists so long as it remains invisible to her husband and undetected in the traditional life they advertise on their farm (named Yesteryear). In one notable exchange in the novel, Natalie's husband, who is deep in the manosphere, questions her about the social media money she's been depositing into a personal account instead of their shared LLC. Natalie immediately dumbs herself down and claims it was just a silly error due to pregnancy brain. For Natalie, maintaining power in her life requires her to perform helplessness. This encapsulates the paradox of the tradwife antiheroine, who shirks a simple victim-villain binary. This new ilk of antiheroine is more uncomfortable for readers to sit with. It's a female archetype more unsettling than that which Amy Dunne epitomized. Whereas Amy Dunne channels the rage of women reduced to a one-dimensional identity, the tradwife antiheroine revels in that essentialism; she perfects and sells the myth of the cool girl back to millions of women with an unbothered smile. 'Yesteryear' Doesn't Commit to the Time Travel Bit What makes Yesteryear such a popular and divisive read is the fact that the novel's dust jacket lures readers in with a time travel premise, but never follows through on it conceptually. Spoiler alert: Natalie Mills does not actually jump back in time to 1855 or enter a parallel reality or anything remotely sci-fi in nature. The alternate historical time period that the novel jumps back and forth between is just a result of a psychotic break. It's a pretty unsatisfying reveal, and the novel's satirical aims suffer in consequence. Even before the plot twist manifests, the author scarcely explores the nitty-gritty of what life on the American frontier entailed. The result is a rather half-baked confrontation with privilege and the lie of the good ol' days that underpins tradwife brands. There's also an untapped conversation about religious trauma that the author dances around, but avoids addressing forthrightly. No doubt, time travel can be a very powerful tool in literature, interrogating historical violence and oppression. Octavia Butler's Kindred is the master work of temporal displacement, calling out the sanitized, nostalgic version of American history that refuses to sit with the brutal reality of racial violence and plantation culture. Yesteryear is not trying to accomplish what Kindred does, and they are certainly not directly comparable narratives. That said, Kindred differentially informs the potency of the fully-realized time travel trope. By retreating from the speculative, Yesteryear leaves unexplored some of its most intriguing possibilities for both plot and character development. Ultimately, the tradwife thriller subgenre has readily demonstrated that it can supply some stellar elevator pitches, but the finished product doesn't always live up to its marketing. As it stands, the tradwife in literature is presented not to explore redemption arcs, but to reckon rather sensationally with the reality of women who actively and unapologetically participate in oppressive, authoritarian systems. As Caro Claire Burke declared in her author interview with Penguin Random House: “There’s nothing more interesting to me as a writer or a person than the grand performance of womanhood.” Judging by the surge of tradwife thrillers hitting the shelves this year, there is clearly a sweeping cultural appetite for untangling on the page what’s behind these on-screen grand performances. Still, the outstanding challenge for the subgenre lies in lending sociopolitical critique beyond just puncturing the tradwife's veneer of idyllic domesticity.