Kirkus A tradwife influencer wakes up to find herself living the old-style life she’s been peddling. To her millions of followers, Natalie Heller Mills’ life appears perfect: Married to the handsome son of a wealthy, family-values-touting U.S. senator, she spends her days posting content of herself churning butter, baking, and crafting in her impeccable farmhouse kitchen; tending to the chickens and other livestock; and posing with her ever-expanding brood against the picturesque barn and rolling fields of her newly acquired Idaho farm, catchily dubbed “Yesteryear.” But the women who follow her don’t know about the nannies and other modern-day cheats that make the farm and family run. They don’t know Natalie’s husband is soft, shiftless, and perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed. And they certainly don’t know that Natalie is not even close to being the “flawless Christian woman” she projects. “The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to”? Yeah, that’s just for Instagram. When Shannon, the producer Natalie hires to broaden her reach, exposes the disconnect between Online Natalie and Offline Natalie, the influencer’s perfect facade begins to crumble and her dream life becomes a nightmare. After an indeterminate amount of time—“Was it a day, a week, a month?”—Natalie wakes up to find herself in a hardscrabble, early-19th-century version of Yesteryear, with children she doesn’t recognize though they insist they’re hers and a husband who looks, but doesn’t act, like her spouse. How did Natalie get here? Is it a prank, a reality show, time travel? In Natalie, Burke has given us an absolutely riveting character—bitchy, narcissistic, and uncaring, yet also incongruously relatable and wickedly entertaining. As it sends up both MAGA and online culture, this deliciously funny, topical, and fiercely intelligent debut also probes deeper questions about authenticity, ambition, kindness, celebrity, consumerism, and what it means to be a woman in America today. It’s also a propulsive page turner, impossible to put down. A remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly A tradwife influencer gets trapped inside the harsh life of an early-19th-century homesteader in Burke’s crafty and cutting debut. To her millions of Instagram followers, Natalie Heller Mills is a “flawless Christian woman” leading an idyllic life on the self-sustaining Yesteryear Ranch with her hardworking husband, Caleb, and their five kids. In reality, the family’s remote Idaho farm is a money pit, Caleb is an internet-addicted conspiracist, and nannies raise the children while a live-in producer curates Natalie’s content, which pays the bills. When Natalie wakes one morning in a rustic facsimile of her home with a family that resembles hers but isn’t, it appears that she has traveled back in time to 1805. Is she a kidnapping victim, an unconsenting reality show contestant, or something more bizarre? All she knows for sure is that the bear traps and boredom of the early 19th century might kill her before she finds out (“Tomorrow, I will not have to shit in a rickety old shed outside”). Burke’s scathing satire of the conservative media complex unfolds from Natalie’s increasingly delusional first-person perspective as the action ping-pongs back and forth in time. Though the big reveal undercuts some of the book’s bite, the narrative is plenty riveting. Burke is off to an auspicious start. Agent: Lisa Grubka, UTA. (Apr.)

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Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, NY Distributed by Syndetic Solutions Inc. Terms

Publisher's Weekly: Elegiac and urgent in tone, Oates's wrenching 26th novel (after Zombie) is a profound and darkly realistic chronicle of one family's hubristic heyday and its fall from grace. The wealthy, socially elite Mulvaneys live on historic High Point Farm, near the small upstate town of Mt. Ephraim, N.Y. Before the act of violence that forever destroys it, an idyllic incandescence bathes life on the farm. Hard-working and proud, Michael Mulvaney owns a successful roofing company. His wife, Corinne, who makes a halfhearted attempt at running an antique business, adores her husband and four children, feeling "privileged by God." Narrator Judd looks up to his older brothers, athletic Mike Jr. ("Mule") and intellectual Patrick ("Pinch"), and his sister, radiant Marianne, a popular cheerleader who is 17 in 1976 when she is raped by a classmate after a prom. Though the incident is hushed up, everyone in the family becomes a casualty. Guilty and shamed by his reaction to his daughter's defilement, Mike Sr. can't bear to look at Marianne, and she is banished from her home, sent to live with a distant relative. The family begins to disintegrate. Mike loses his business and, later, the homestead. The boys and Corinne register their frustration and sadness in different, destructive ways. Valiant, tainted Marianne runs from love and commitment. More than a decade later, there is a surprising denouement, in which Oates accommodates a guardedly optimistic vision of the future. Each family member is complexly rendered and seen against the background of social and cultural conditioning. As with much of Oates's work, the prose is sometimes prolix, but the very rush of narrative, in which flashbacks capture the same urgency of tone as the present, gives this moving tale its emotional power. 75,000 first printing; author tour.

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