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 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Having just been fired from her job at a public relations firm, Cassandra “Cassie” Dankworth pauses to consider where stories begin, as well as other things in her life that have recently ended, including her membership of two different book clubs, a flatshare, and her last relationship, earlier that morning.
When her attention returns to the present moment, her boss, Barry Fawcett, tells her she’s being fired due to what her client, Jack, owner of the men’s skincare brand SharkSkin, has described as her “relentlessly grating behavior” (12), despite her protests that likability is not in her contract. Cassie reflects on the fact that she could have begun the story in several different places, including earlier that morning, at the beginning of her now-over relationship with Will, or when her parents died in a car accident 10 years earlier.
A colleague, Sophie, expresses upset at her impending departure, but Cassie can’t decipher whether this is real or affected. She packs her possessions and moves to leave the office, despite her boss’s protests that he’d expected her to work for the duration of her notice period. She declines, receiving and replying to a text message from a flatmate about a mess she left in the kitchen. Another colleague, “Ronald,” who is later introduced as Cameron (Cassie inadvertently extends the nickname “Ron” to the wrong origin) exits the office to catch her before she gets onto the elevator. While Cassie prepares for what she’ll say if he makes a romantic advance, he informs her that the plant she’s planning to take with her was in fact his.
Chapter 2 Summary
Cassie exits the office building in flight mode. She begins to panic, realizing that “if I don’t find a way to calm down immediately, it is going to happen” (19), and she then decides that procuring a banana muffin will circumvent the impending catastrophe. The proprietor of the café says that a delivery issue means there are no banana muffins today, and she devolves into grief about the fact that she won’t see Will again and wasn’t prepared for their breakup. As she leaves the café, she is swept up in an anti-fur protest. She’s hit with fake blood, directed at the faux fox tail clipped on her handbag. Overwhelmed and unable to make it home, Cassie crouches in the doorway of “Bar Humbug” and curls into a ball, which she describes as “reacting to stress like a hedgehog” (23), before waiting to black out.
Chapter 3 Summary
Cassie comes to, thinking about the various ways people have described her brain and behavior over the years, and realizes that her watch and the box with her office possessions have been stolen. At her flat, she receives an unfriendly welcome from her roommates, Salini, who goes by Sal and hasn’t forgiven Cassie for a misunderstanding, and Sal’s boyfriend, Derek. The “misunderstanding,” which occurs in detail later in the narrative, is that Derek hits on Cassie, who tells Sal. However, Derek lies so convincingly that he was just being friendly, and Cassie was the one flirting with him that Cassie apologizes and Sal becomes angry with her.
Sal angrily informs her she’s received a letter, which Cassie rips up. Cassie thinks of the letter-writer as little as possible, having compartmentalized their argument, but much later in the narrative, the author exposes that she is Cassie’s sister, Artemis. A decade earlier, at their parents’ funeral, a drunk, 19-year-old Artemis accused Cassie of being responsible for their parents’ death by calling them incessantly while they were driving, and she called Cassie a monster. The sisters haven’t spoken in over a decade, despite the fact that Artemis frequently sends letters scented with pomegranate—the fruit of the dead in mythology—as attempts to apologize.
Cassie promises she’ll look harder for another place to live, then returns to her room, which she likes despite its size and lack of storage space. She thinks again about Will and texts him to ask whether they’ve made the right decision. He tells her they have in a tone she finds unfitting of their breakup. Cassie is nearly asleep when the doorbell rings and is surprised to see that it is Will.
Chapter 4 Summary
Cassie confusedly wonders whether Will has come for a debrief about the end of their relationship, but he hurries her out the door, and they depart together. He tells her they’re going to “If It Ain’t Baroque,” the same themed pop-up restaurant they visited the night before. She asks him about the morning, unable to wait for him to clarify his purpose in meeting her. He apologizes, and she is overjoyed that their breakup appears to have been a misunderstanding. Will is excited to order a dish Cassie knows he ordered the night before. He tells her they hadn’t been to the restaurant the previous night, and while doubtful, she believes she might have created a false memory by researching the restaurant extensively in advance. He announces that he’s received an exciting film assignment in India—a documentary about pangolins—and will be gone for a month, which Cassie tells him she knows already.
Chapter 5 Summary
Cassie researches déjà vu on her phone, until Will asks her to return to their conversation. She tries to discern whether he’s gaslighting her or whether she’s experiencing a malfunction in her brain. She announces that she’s leaving, and he escorts her home. Will tells Cassie that she needs to communicate better, and while she wonders if they’ll have sex or not, they go to sleep. In the morning, he begins the same breakup speech he delivered the day before, and Cassie asks him if he’s saying “lovely things […] that [he] clearly [doesn’t] mean so that [he] can casually segue into breaking up with me again” (48), and he responds that he is.
Unlike the day before, Cassie is not frozen and demands a tangible reason, which she doesn’t receive. She is surprised to see the watch, her 16th birthday present from her parents, that was stolen the previous day, sitting on the bedside table. Cassie then overhears an argument between Sal and Derek that had transpired the previous day, smells the fish and chips from their Tuesday night takeaway, and finally acknowledges that it is somehow Wednesday again. Cassie’s boss calls, asking “why the balls” (53) she isn’t yet at work by 9:30 am.
Chapter 6 Summary
Acknowledging that she is “stuck in a time loop” (55), Cassie goes to her office, late for a client meeting. She corrects her boss’s lie that she’s late because her (actually deceased) mother is ill. She then announces what she knows from her previous experience of this meeting: The clients, Jack and Gareth, have already replaced their PR agency, largely because of their dislike of Cassie, which will lead to her firing. She preempts the conversation with Barry and begins to pack her desk again. Beginning to panic at the idea that she may continue to repeat this particular bad day in perpetuity, she decides to steal the rubber plant this time in order to alter her own destiny. While Ron comes after her in the same way as the day before, this time she drops the plant, breaking the pot. Cassie is very relieved that this means “things can be changed” (60), and by extension, they can be fixed.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Smale opens the novel in media res, with Cassie distracted by her thoughts about where a story begins and things she’s been asked not to return to, before coming back to the moment, about 80 seconds after being fired. The reader thus learns both expository details about Cassie’s breakup and firing and about how her mind works: She is prone to detachment from difficult social situations and has philosophical views on time and narrative. Here, the author introduces the symbol of self-conscious references to the novel’s plot, foreshadowing the idea of time as fluid.
Smale employs both first-person narration and the narrative structure itself to characterize Cassie’s experience of neurodiversity. For example, when Cassie’s colleague, Sophie, expresses regret about Cassie’s firing, Cassie has “no idea if she means this or not. If she does, it’s certainly unexpected” (14); because the reader doesn’t yet have any characterizing details about Sophie, they share the experience of not knowing whether she is genuine. Smale thus creates an experiential process of characterizing Cassie’s relationship with the world around her. The use of first-person narration allows a detailed representation of the specifics of Cassie’s thought process about social interactions. When Ron comes out of the office to confront her about the plant, she thinks he is “casually assessing me as if I’m a half-ripe avocado” (17), visceral imagery that characterizes how Cassie interacts with others. Smale characterizes Cassie as observant, intelligent, and insightful, and these traits are apparent in her description of the world and people around her. Even when she doesn’t understand a social interaction or another individual’s action or motivation, she describes it in specific detail. Through both internal thoughts and the words of others, Smale thus establishes the theme of Neurodiversity As Perceived by Self Versus Others.
The use of detail also contributes to the darkly humorous tone of the novel. Smale infuses dialogue with humor, like Barry’s statement, “Jesus on a yellow bicycle, what is wrong with you?” (59), after Cassie declines to work during her notice period. References to humor are often connected to Cassie’s difficulty with understanding others’ intentions, suggesting that humor functions as a defense mechanism. For example, she wonders if, rather than a breakup, Will has come “for Constructive Feedback we can dissect, process and work on together” and likens him to “a desperate mobile-phone salesperson” (35). The specificity and unexpectedness of this simile both creates a comedic effect and characterizes Cassie’s need to analyze social interactions in detail to make sense of them. Much of the novel’s humor is derived from the unexpected nature of these details, like the woman at the protest’s assertion that “foxes get an electrode up their butts” (22), which produces dark humor by virtue of its abruptness. Comedic details also contribute to the setting of Cassie’s world, like the fact that the pivotal doorway in which she originally time travels is that of an establishment called Bar Humbug, a pun on Ebenezer Scrooge’s “bah humbug.”
Smale introduces the synesthetic motif of Cassie’s experience of emotions as colors in this section of the novel. Initially, because Cassie is in a stressful situation, her synesthesia stems from being overwhelmed. At the fur protest, she describes an older lady as getting too close to her, “pores like orange coral, emotions neon yellow” (22). On her date with Will, she senses “a torrent of colors: a strange mix I can’t untangle, like a ball of different-colored wools” (40). Again, Smale employs detailed and visceral imagery to represent Cassie’s association between color and emotion, as well as to characterize her experience of the world and people around her.
In the first section of the novel, Smale represents several of the most significant problems Cassie is experiencing. In addition to her breakup and firing and the impending end of her current flatshare, Cassie dislikes her job and lacks a sense of community. Her initial shock at the ability to time travel quickly gives way to practicality. She initially thinks she may be caught in a time loop, repeating the same day, which she describes as ironic, given that she is “not averse to repetition,” but takes “enormous pleasure and comfort in it” (59). The section concludes with her second firing and attempt to see whether she can change the timeline via the plant experiment. The fact that it breaks is the confirmation that catalyzes Cassie to consider what she’ll do next with her time-travel ability.
