Yesteryear, 2026’s buzziest book, is undone by the worst kind of twist ending.

This article contains spoilers for Yesteryear.

All this summer, Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, has remained in the Top Five of the New York Times bestseller list, where it is now 17 weeks into an epic run, having reached No. 1 back in May. This is a book-clubby novel I spotted in the hands or tote bags of more than one stranger sitting lakeside on my recent vacation, and it’s already been snatched up for a big movie adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, so its plot is now perhaps common knowledge: Bright and homeschooled young Natalie goes to Harvard, nabs a rich husband, parlays his family money into the purchase of a property in Idaho, names it Yesteryear Farm, and becomes a classic sourdough-and-babies tradwife influencer. But we know, because the book’s in her voice, that Natalie Heller Mills’ life is a palace of lies. She’s driven by bile, full of hate and judgment for everyone from her classmates at Harvard to her husband, Caleb, to her many children.

To borrow Natalie’s analysis, the book went viral because it is both lovable and unbearable.

The book toggles back and forth between chapters covering events in the present day and a timeline located in some vaguely pioneer past. As the story begins, Natalie wakes up quite suddenly in a cold bed, spread with a coverlet she doesn’t recognize, having seemingly been transported back to the 19^th century. Her house is laid out like her house, but it’s decrepit and lacks electricity. Her children look like her children but aren’t—not quite. She was pregnant but isn’t anymore. Her husband is her husband, but old. And her life is awful: washing endless laundry in cold water, making boules upon boules of bad bread, drinking raw milk out of a pail “smeared with cow shit,” and eating meals made up of only one or two food groups. This is a woman who once sold the fantasy of antimodernism, and now is condemned to live the reality.

It’s the book that launched a thousand posts. Writing for the BBC late last month, Clare Thorp argued that the reason for Yesteryear’s buzz is simply our fascination with tradwives themselves, with many such figures—like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, whom many readers have posited as an inspiration for the book—attracting millions of gawking followers. Natalie herself neatly describes the appeal of her persona: “The goal of the influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.” But I’d argue Thorp severely undersells the strength of the negative reaction some readers have had to Yesteryear. After all, there have been many other novels written in the near past and coming out in the near future that are about tradwives, but none have gotten a fraction of the sales or the hate this one’s enjoyed. To borrow Natalie’s analysis, the book went viral because it is both lovable and unbearable.

Some common anti-Yesteryear arguments: Natalie’s extreme unlikability means you’re far too eager to see her blamed and punished, delivering catharsis to angry liberal readers while letting patriarchy off the hook. The role of religion in Natalie’s life is vague and underdeveloped. Natalie’s eventual legal punishment for child abuse is unrealistic, underselling the plight of real-life kids who are brought up in antimodern isolation, or overexposed on social media, because of their parents’ ideologies. And then there are the little things: On Goodreads, in a sure sign of readerly annoyance, one-star reviews tally up countless continuity errors and factual flubs. (A character forages for saffron in the woods in Idaho, and boy, does that bother people.)

I would largely characterize myself as a Yesteryear enjoyer. But the more I speak with fellow readers about this book, the more it seems to me that the twist revealed at the novel’s end is an underrated source of the friction people feel with the story. Natalie wakes up in fake 1855 not because (as she first thinks) she’s in a reality show, nor because (as she next thinks) God is testing her, but because she’s had some kind of psychotic break, with help from an unnamed pharmaceutical fed to her by her family.

We find out that, stressed to the limit by a scandal involving Yesteryear’s former videographer, Natalie initially agreed to this more extreme version of off-the-grid living, but at some point along the way, as she put it, “my brain began to whine and smoke from the pressure, until finally it snapped in half like a twig.” The time between whenever that was and the moment she wakes up in the cold bed is, frustratingly, hand-wavingly, lost to her memory. This includes the forgotten births of four children. In other words: “She was just nuts and high the whole time, I guess. The end!” as one Substacker wrote.

We find out the whole family has been in on this sham. Caleb has been pretending it’s 1855, telling his younger sons about threats from wolves and “Indians.” The oldest pair of brothers have been hiding on a neighboring property and slipping their father vegetables and meat from the grocery store when his farming and trapping falls short, and the couple’s youngest four kids have been lied to about everything. Mary, the eldest daughter of this second group of children, has spent years serving as housewife, nanny, and servant for the whole family, while her mother languishes in madness. The other older children estranged themselves from their parents as teenagers, after Caleb and Natalie got rid of the family car (“the last piece of modernity we’d been holding onto”) and fully committed to their antiquated life. At the very end, the true eldest daughter, Clementine, returns like an avenging angel, and whisks Mary and the younger kids away. Natalie, by now in her mid-to-late-50s, gets 30 years in jail.

If Natalie had actually time-traveled to the real 1855, would the book have felt more satisfying? Some readers, like novelist Leigh Stein, felt the loss of the actual 19^th century keenly. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to read a fully articulated bit of historical fiction about a modern woman enduring the Idaho frontier, maybe meeting other real pioneer women, rather than parsing this odd fake setting, where any inaccuracy or undercommitment to the bit (saffron in Idaho!) can be explained away by the fact that this “past” is a constructed one, fabricated out of Caleb’s and Natalie’s imperfect minds? And doesn’t the “it was all a dream”–style surprise ending negate the book’s attempt at social commentary? “The Most Popular Book of the Year Has Nothing to Say,” Jerusalem Demsas and Maibritt Henkel titled their newsletter for the Argument in May. “Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks,” the two wrote. Rather, they’re marketing a vision of submissive conservatism while making money online. “But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?”

Burke isn’t the first novelist or screenwriter to use a main character’s dramatic dissociation as a plot device. Shutter Island and Fight Club exist. A Beautiful Mind won Best Picture. But there’s something annoyingly unwieldy about Natalie’s break from reality and the sham world her family constructs for her. Why would someone like Caleb—a foolish rich boy who loves being online talking conspiracy theories, and has recently fantasized about moving to New York—have agreed to this cockamamie plan, and would he really have had the ability to follow through on this lie for so long? Didn’t any of the neighbors, maybe the midwife who helped Natalie with previous home births, wonder what was up?

Most deeply of all, you have to wonder why Natalie, who hated everything about domesticity except the parts where she earned money and dopamine hits from influencing, would agree—even before the drugging and the psychotic break—to this scenario, where she would raise her family without nannies, day laborers, pesticides, microwaves, or occasional trips to Target. It seems far more likely, given everything we learn about the unlikable Natalie Heller Mills, that she would have found a way to steal some money and leave her entire family behind.

In the end the novel is less Fight Club than a more recent film: 2022’s senseless (and punctuation-less) Don’t Worry Darling, in which a group of housewives are likewise forced into divorcing themselves from their present-day reality in order to live out a regressive fantasy of the past. (In that case, it’s the 1950s.) But in searching for a way to pull the rug out from under the audience, each story also undercuts its own relevance to our time and creates endless possibilities for confusion. As Slate movie critic Dana Stevens wrote of Don’t Worry Darling, the “big twist doesn’t work on the level of either theme or plot.” Picking “she was just nuts” is always a gamble. This time, it doesn’t pay off.