54 pages • 1 hour read
Holly SmaleCassandra in Reverse
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Leaving the office, Cassie decides to repeat what happened the day before and replicate the experiment. While her memory is usually exemplary, she initially has difficulty recalling what came next, eventually remembering the banana muffin. She goes back to the café and preempts the owner informing her that they don’t have any banana muffins, before going outside and being swept up—this time purposefully—in the protest. Despite being there intentionally this time, Cassie again finds herself overwhelmed and finds the Bar Humbug doorway from the day before. However, she decides that she won’t repeat this day again and that she intends to start her story “from the beginning” (65), in case the time-travel ability is an opportunity to correct the moment her life went wrong. While she doesn’t think about it directly until later in the narrative, she initially intends to go back to stop the car accident that killed her parents and led to her estrangement from her sister.
Chapter 8 Summary
Cassie determines that she needs to figure out how to control time and is disappointed to realize that, unlike the previous day, she doesn’t appear to have gone back in time after her blackout. She decides to continue with her daily routine and goes into clothing store Zara to browse. Instead, she runs into Will, whom she realizes lied to her about having a meeting. She follows him and asks if they can talk. Referring to his comments about being more open, she tells him that she thinks she’s been time traveling and is disappointed that she doesn’t seem to be able to go back to the day her parents died and save them, since she believes that might have been what set her life on the wrong course. Will replies that he doesn’t know who she is, and Cassie realizes that she has traveled to June 6, the day they met. While horrified at what “isn’t a meet-cute” but a “meet-horrifying” (72), Cassie realizes that she has been able to time travel and returns to Bar Humbug to try again.
Chapter 9 Summary
After 17 attempts, Cassie realizes that June 6 appears to be the furthest back in time she’s able to move. Accepting this, she remembers that there’s an “Idea Hurricane” scheduled for work and sends Barry a curt email telling him she won’t be attending. When he replies with a criticism of her email etiquette and a rejection of her statement that she’ll be taking the afternoon off, she goes back in time 60 seconds and rewrites it with additional emojis and niceties, noting that an extra minute could have made all the difference for several Greek gods’ predicaments, too. Deciding she values their relationship and Will more than she realized, she goes back to the café where she originally met him, and he again asks if he can sit in the empty seat opposite her.
Chapter 10 Summary
While Cassie notes that all she needs to say is “sure,” she repeatedly reacts in ways that ensure that Will does not sit down. She finally decides to switch seats to “break me out of a loop of my own creation” (85), reminding herself that if it happened once, she can do it again. Will sits down in the chair that used to be hers. Their flirtatious conversation begins in the same way it originally did, but Cassie is surprised by Will going off script several times. Despite these divergences, several key moments recur, and Cassie enjoys having been prepared for the social interaction in a way she’s never experienced before.
Chapter 11 Summary
Cassie arrives home to her flat and is both surprised and relieved to be in “The Time Before” (94) with regard to her relationship with Sal. She attempts to make conversation with Sal and Derek but eventually retreats to her room. She’s calmed by the space and her things, taking inventory of the slight differences between this four-months-ago room and the later version she remembers. Sal brings the dinner Cassie has forgotten in the microwave, a gesture Cassie finds moving, and delivers a pomegranate-scented letter (revealed later to be from Artemis) that arrived for Cassie.
Chapter 12 Summary
Cassie develops a plan to save her relationship, living situation, and career over the course of the next four months. Barry confronts Cassie about her email and her afternoon off, informing her that Idea Hurricanes are mandatory. She attempts to prepare for her upcoming meeting SharkSkin, determined to use her hindsight to save her PR career, but is interrupted by Sophie’s “pointless chitchat.” She begins her meeting with Jack and Gareth, attempting to be likeable, and is disappointed to note that the branding of the men’s skincare products is the same in this universe—“yellow and blue stripes with orange lids and a leaping shark drawn jumping across the front, flecks of blood spinning out of its mouth” (110). Jack then insists that Cassie smell the moisturizer. While she knows that she needs to do anything other than what she did in the previous timeline, she is unable to prevent gagging and proclaiming it disgusting.
Chapter 13 Summary
Cassie rewinds several times, eventually succeeding in holding her breath and giving the acceptable reply that SharkSkin is “powerful stuff.” While she attempts to nudge Jack in a different direction, he insists on the same campaign that failed previously. Frustrated that she wasn’t able to make any changes to the original meeting, she decides to text Will, contravening the previous timeline in which he texted her first, and they arrange a date for that night.
Chapters 7-13 Analysis
The narrative arc of this section of the novel is based on Cassie’s developing understanding of her time-travel abilities and decisions about how to use them, advancing the theme of Inevitability As Opposed to the Ability to Determine One’s Fate. Smale subverts typical time-loop and time-travel tropes in that Cassie’s decisions and the rules of her ability ensure that they don’t involve dramatic progress through time or particularly drastic action. For example, Cassie thinks, “I’ll sort out time travel later: an ex-boyfriend waits for no woman” when she spots Will in Zara (69). With regard to Cassie’s choice to revise only small aspects of her daily life, the focus on routine revisions emphasizes that small differences can make a significant difference, particularly as they relate to social interaction. While the narrative is asynchronous in the sense that Cassie persistently rewinds time, her first-person narration remains linear. While she is characterized as having an excellent memory, little of the narrative action takes place in the form of reminiscence, instead remaining active and experiential: The reader is consistently in the moment with Cassie, even when that moment happens to be in the past.
Compared to Chapters 1-6, this section of the novel includes more frequent insights from Cassie about those around her as she explores The Complexity and Importance of Human Connection. Having rehearsed many of the events of Chapters 7-13 once before, she is at points more aware of the tone, motivations, and emotions of other people. Smale thus offers an insight into the experience of neurodiversity for the reader by creating an experiential contrast between how social interactions affect neurotypical or neurodiverse individuals. She suggests that she “cannot believe how much easier flirting is when you’ve already rehearsed it once before” (90), and she finds unexpected pleasure in interactions at work and with Will, given that she knows what to expect.
Throughout the novel, Cassie thinks about the world in relation to Greek mythology, which functions as a symbol of fate. Greek mythology is also a tool Cassie uses to make sense of the world and other people, as she compares them to mythical figures. Further, she processes her time-travel ability by way of Greek mythology. In thinking she’ll attempt to go back far enough to save her parents, she thinks “Which is ridiculous, right? As if I’m Heracles, charging into the Underworld and grabbing Alcestis” (71). While she is surprised at how quickly she adjusts to her ability to time travel and begins to feel “entitled” to it, she reprioritizes quickly after she realizes that she can only travel back four months. Her decisions about what to change are based on preserving things she wants to avoid losing: her relationship with Will, her relationship with Sal and Derek (and thereby her living situation), and her job. These choices characterize Cassie’s desire to avoid change rather than actively pursuing new happiness. While she loves Will, who is characterized as a kind and interesting person, her living situation is unideal, and she admittedly doesn’t like her job. Smale thus highlights a paradoxical resistance to change, even as Cassie is in the process of changing small items about the past.
