Cassandra in Reverse

December 1, 2022

One terrible day, Cassandra Dankworth is dumped by her boyfriend and loses her PR job for not being a people person. By evening, she's delighted when her ex shows up, but the next morning the whole sequence starts again, and she finds herself repeating the same unbearable 24 hours, determined to fix what's wrong with her life until she realizes she's been focusing on the wrong problems. Best-selling YA author Smale, who discovered that she was autistic as an adult, features a neurodivergent protagonist; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

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July 3, 2023
In Smale’s appealing adult debut (after the YA novel Love Me Not), a London woman discovers an ability to travel back in time. Cassie Penelope Dankworth is prickly and uncompromising, traits that lead to her being fired by her London PR firm and dumped by her boyfriend, Will. She also has autism, a fact her intolerant coworkers wish was disclosed to them before she was hired. After these events appear to happen, however, Cassie realizes she’s in a time loop—her boss calls her “sweetheart” and she still has a job. As she learns to manipulate her newfound ability, she muses on her power to change the story of her life. Smale then leads readers through a tale of Cassie’s habitual time travel, which produces multiple outcomes from the same situations. Some of these are mundane—a slice of bread is burned, then toasted perfectly; keys are forgotten, then remembered—while others are consequential, such as Cassie’s introduction of Will to her sister, which leads to their romance and bitter feelings for Cassie. Though Cassie’s time tweaks can be hard to follow, her narration beautifully evokes her inner life (“I rarely understand what another human is thinking, but I frequently feel it: a wave of emotion that pours out of them into me, like a teapot into a cup”). This is a delight.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
Cassandra Penelope Dankworth is 31, stuck in a PR job she hates, and struggling in her relationships because she cannot pick up on emotional cues. After a bad breakup followed by getting fired, Cassie has a meltdown and unexpectedly discovers the ability to travel back in time. Attempting to reset the present by changing the past, Cassie finds herself questioning if she can get it right or if she should be trying at all. From her on-point referencing of ancient Greek life and mythology as a pathway to understanding the world to acknowledging the frustration people feel with her to her seeing colors instead of perceiving emotions, Cassie's quirks make her uniquely lovable. In her adult debut, Smale, author of the teen Geek Girl series, combines well-developed characters with laugh-out-loud humor as she slowly reveals truths about past events, current troubles, and her protagonist's undiagnosed autism. Readers will be drawn into Cassie's life and won't want to leave. This neurodiverse tale is ripe for discussion and makes a great read-alike for The Rosie Project (2013), by Graeme Simsion; Oona out of Order (2020), by Margarita Montimore; and The Boys (2022), by Katie Hafner.

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