?Yesteryear,? Caro Claire Burke?s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows her own food, tends to cows and chickens, raises her six children and models a particular brand of conservative Christian womanhood. But not all is as it seems. Behind the cameras, nannies care for the children, Natalie shops for the types of groceries she decries online, she detests her husband with his manosphere beliefs, and she?s on the cusp of being exposed by a rogue video producer.

One day she wakes up and discovers she has been transported to 1855, forced to live the pioneer persona she has been performing online. How did she get there? How can she escape? And what does her misery mean about the lifestyle she has embraced for profit?

"Yesteryear" was met with fanfare after it was published in April. Even before the book was released, it was scooped up for a film adaptation that Anne Hathaway is set to star in and produce. The novel was selected as a ?Good Morning America? Book Club pick; Burke appeared on ?Late Night With Seth Meyers?; and the book has spent more than a month on The Times?s best-seller list.

Everyone, it seems, is talking about ?Yesteryear.? But does it live up to the hype? On this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Jennifer Harlan and Joumana Khatib.

Other books mentioned in this episode:

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In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association.

Partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit included a now-infamous photograph by Andres Serrano that showed a crucifix submerged in Serrano?s own urine. Incensed, Wildmon sent a copy of the photo to every member of Congress, setting off a battle led by the Christian right over what contemporary art could be and who should receive federal funding for it.

Isaac Butler, an author and cultural historian, walks through this and other pivotal moments in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in his new book, ?The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America?s Culture Wars.?

Butler spoke to the Book Review?s editor, Gilbert Cruz, about how these fights unfolded and what they meant for the artists themselves. He sat down to write the book, he said, when ?it really felt like the culture wars of the ?80s and ?90s that I grew up in were repeating again.?

Books and plays discussed on this episode:

?The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America?s Culture Wars,? by Isaac Butler

?Measure for Measure,? by William Shakespeare

?Transgressions: The Offences of Art,? by Anthony Julius

?It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic,? by Jack Lowery

?The Devil Finds Work,? by James Baldwin

?Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz,? by Cynthia Carr

?Elia Kazan: A Life,? by Elia Kazan

?Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery,? by Richard Kreitner

?The Kindness of Strangers,? by Salka Viertel

?The Talmud: A Biography,? by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

?My Last Sigh,? by Luis Buñuel

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