Warning: This post contains spoilers for Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. If you’d like to discover the twist for yourself, here’s my spoiler-free reaction. This post discusses and reveals the ending to Yesteryear.

I have to admit I was pretty far into Yesteryear and still trying to figure out the time travel. The book moves between Natalie’s life as a tradwife influencer with a stylishly “simple” farmhouse and adorable children, and a second timeline in which she’s living on the real frontier, with a family that’s not quite her own.

Actually, the book moves around even more than that. In the tradwife timeline, we see Natalie carefully constructing her influencer life. Literally building her farmhouse home, with all the high-end appliances and conveniences, carefully tucked out of camera sight.  Building her brand and her narrative around her marriage, getting her funding from her father-in-law, and then slowly revealing the disappointment in her husband.

One more spoiler comment: Was anyone else underwhelmed when we “discovered” that Natalie’s husband is cheating on her?  Banging the assistant? The novel had so many wild twists and surprises that I felt a little letdown at the most predictable event possible. Of course he’s cheating on her. Of course their tradwife farmlife perfection is based on every single aspect being a lie.

You know I love influencer fiction, especially thrillers, and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stories, so of course I was hooked.

In the pioneer scenes, daily life is especially hard. At first, I thought these were dream sequences, highlighting Natalie’s fake-rustic lifestyle and comparing kneading bread for Instagram with kneading bread for survival.  She can’t leave her house, either, even though the men in the family can. There are scary traps and dangers outside the house, but she has so many chores, she doesn’t really have time to go exploring anyway.

Natalie has different children in the pioneer time, and her husband is still recognizably Caleb, just older and weather-beaten. In what I first took for the past timeline, Natalie begins to find evidence of her influencer life, like a bit of plastic that shouldn’t exist in the past. She wonders if she’s on a pioneer reality show, but at that point, I was still thinking this timeline was a dream sequence, and the hint of the future was more symbolism than clue.

The pioneer timeline is actually Natalie’s future… it’s all still our time and our world!  After the fallout from Caleb’s affair, Natalie has had some kind of mental break, slipping further into historical tradwife life, and eventually separating from everything modern and everyone she knows, except Caleb It’s hard to determine exactly when this slides into insanity… She was already lying to everyone, pretty much from the start.  She start pretending about tradlife the first time she met Caleb. She’s lying to him about her finances,  lying to her followers about her life, and lying to herself about her father-in-law’s campaign goals. I think the novel asks us when the lies became insanity,  when pretending to have a perfect family and a traditional, handmade life became losing her grip on reality.  It’s hard to say exactly where the line is, but Natalie clearly passes it.

This wasn’t a dual-timeline story or a time-travel story.  Her pioneer children are the children she and Caleb had after their influencer life ended.  Their previous daughter, Clementine, reappears to rescue their siblings from their awful life. One of Natalie’s new children has mental issues from a complicated birth with no medical assistance. It is clear, both, that this is child abuse and that Natalie has no idea.

I loved the twist, what an unhinged, wild surprise. But also… what a solid resolution to the characters developed through the course of the book.  Caleb has been such a non-entity in the book. Even his cheating felt less like Caleb having a strong desire, and more like him drifting predictably into a predictable affair with a younger woman.  He felt much more like the villain here, since he was slipping out to watch games and visit relatives, and clearly knew that his wife was insane and their (second set of) children were in danger. But, as usual, he doesn’t really take any action. He felt like the villain here, but also, what do we expect after years of him just going along?

I wanted just a little bit more from the ending, mostly because Natalie’s old roommate, Reena, drops a line about how her life turned out so differently from what she’d expected, and that Natalie couldn’t guess, so she’ll tell her about it later. I really wanted to get the later, because I was so curious, but I understand why it’s never explained. For so many years, Natalie was in a secret, personal competition with Reena. Was Reena’s life awesome? Difficult? Both? We just know that Natalie lost her mental competition.