A wonderful take on the time loop trope. Cassandra is a darling and I enjoyed getting to know her as she navigates (and re-navigates) her work and love life.

We meet Cassandra as her day keeps getting worse and worse - dumped by her boyfriend out of the blue, fired from her job for being "unlikable", and to top it all off, her go-to muffin order is out of stock at her local coffee shop. Overwhelmed, Cassandra curls into a ball and is unwittingly thrust into the past. Once she finds out she can control time (though she can't go back very far), she gives herself plenty of do overs as she tries to stop her boyfriend from breaking things off and salvages her career.

This was delightful - I enjoyed the plot, the pacing, and Cassandra's narration. Recommended to anyone looking for a charming feel-good read.

Thank you very much to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

Cassandra has difficulties just carrying out her day to day life. Then she discovers she can go back in the past 4 months of her life, which gives her the perfect opportunities to fix what has gone wrong, however, she maybe doesn't quite fix the things that should be fixed. This reminded me a bit of Sliding Doors but with different themes. Cassandra could also be described as Autistic and very intelligent. She even loves comparing herself to Greek mythology.

Although a little slow getting into, Cassandra in Reverse was an enjoyable read. There are some quirky, likeable characters, and of course the time travel theme thrown in. I love time travel, however, this could have been explored a bit more, I felt, then perhaps the story would not have been so predictable.

Holly Smale is an excellent writer and great at character development. She perhaps tried to throw too many themes into this one story, which at times, bogged down the reading.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed are my own.

When time travel is done well, the joys of reading a time travel are infinite. And Smale does it well. This novel contains multitudes - it is a perceptive and moving account of a neurodivergent young woman who sees the world in colours, and has trouble with the day to day interactions among humans, impacting her relationships, her work, and her living arrangements. The novel also explores our relationship with time - noting that there are many things one can do with time - "save it, spend it, stitch it, kill it, ... beat it, steal it, and watch it fly." There is a strong theme of Greek mythology running through the plot. And finally, the time travel. When Cassandra realizes she has the ability to go back in time to undo or do something better, she uses it to try to improve her romantic and work relationships and in process understands so much more about herself and the world. This is not about going back to in time to prevent a war or prevent a death. Rather, it is smaller and more relatable. Who among us doesn't want to go back in time to unsay something or undo something? Highly recommend this smart and evocative novel, Thanks so much to NetGalley and Harlequin for this ARC.

Cassandra has been going through her worst day when she finds out she can go back in time. She can't go so far to saver her parents from their car accident, but she can go back to four months before, when she met her now ex-boyfriend, since he's just dumped her, and as she redoes and redoes their dates again, she also gets to see her job from another angle, as well as her flatmates.

I loved Cassandra in the beginning. She's always talking about Greek myths in comparison with her life, and I love those myths. And she was strangely relatable, even though smart, self-sufficient characters like her rarely are likeable. But the way the book uses time travel—they even poke fun at this in its later half—was disappointing. Everything was predictable to top it off. The only thing that threw some mystery was the woman who kept following Cassandra, but even that, though my favorite character that brought life to the end of the book, the reveal was too lackluster for all the build-up. With time, even all the talk about Greek mythology tired me down, as it didn't add to the story and it kept tempting me to skip it.

Unfortunately, the book was mostly too predictable for me to enjoy it. I like Cassandra's arc, she goes a long way, but even that was already too obvious from the start for me to feel like congratulating someone.

Enjoyable read if you're the type who enjoys the moment, and I wish I were, but I'm not.


Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Whew…
This book is a time-loop. Sometimes it jumps a few minutes back, sometimes a day and sometimes a week…it’s hard to keep up with and sometimes confusing!

This book ended well. I did feel like there was a lot of negativity about being on the neurodivergent spectrum…it just kept going on and on about everything negative and didn’t highlight anything positive until the end. I would have liked for our main character to have given a little more grace.

Overall I gave it three stars. Thank you to the author and NetGalley for this ARC opportunity!

Did I apply for this book on NetGalley solely because of the title and story’s surface similarities to Oona Out of Order? You bet I did. Cassandra in Reverse even has a blurb from Margaret Montimore. But don’t let this association colour your ideas about Holly Smale’s take on time-hopping through one’s own life, for this novel is very much its own story—and it’s a good one. Thank you to publisher MIRA for the eARC!

Cassandra Dankworth is dumped by her boyfriend and fired from her job on the same day. Also, her flatmate situation has become untenable. After this no good, very bad day, Cassandra is at her wit’s end. Overwhelmed and defeated, that’s when she discovers for the first time that she can, through sheer mental effort, travel back along her own timeline and relive her life from any point. She can’t go back all that far—certainly not far enough to save her parents from a fatal traffic collision when she was younger. But four months is enough time to save her relationship, her living situation, and her career. Right?

As I said in my introduction and is worth reiterating here: when you look at Cassandra in Reverse more closely, it’s actually quite distinct from Oona Out of Order. Notably, Cassandra has agency over her time-travel ability, whereas Oona is a passenger on her nonlinear life. Cassandra’s ability is a kind of gigantic do-over button—and who hasn’t wished for this power, let’s be honest? Any time I say something that proves mildly embarrassing or uncomfortable, any time the perfectionist in me thinks “I could have handled that better,” I wish for exactly this ability to blink my way back to that moment and do it ever so slightly better.

Of course, this leads to some self-imposed Groundhog Days, if you will, as Cassandra starts to obsess over getting certain days right. The iterations start to blur together (both to her and the reader), a deliberate decision on Smale’s part, I believe, that helps us to see how confusing this experience must be for Cassandra. Living a single day over and over is one thing—redoing weeks at a time, while trying to hold memories of all the different timelines in one’s head? That must be an incredible feat!

The book left me with several unanswered questions about Cassandra’s ability. First, there’s no explanation for why she can time travel (fair enough) nor why she can, seemingly arbitrarily, only go back to about four months prior to the start of the book. Perhaps most intriguing to me is the possibility that this ability makes Cassandra effectively immortal, albeit with some caveats. In theory, she could live out her life and then, in her old age, travel back in time to a younger age and keep looping her life, even trying different variations of it. Of course, this assumes that her ability remains viable for the rest of her life (and that she could go back further than four months prior by then). But it’s an interesting idea!

To be clear, the fact that none of these questions are answered doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I just wanted to ruminate on them in my review.

Indeed, I rather like that Cassandra raises some questions about the ethics of time travel at all. As I mentioned in my review of Some Desperate Glory, my experience watching The Flash TV series has thoroughly convinced me that time travel is largely unethical. Cassandra ponders what happens to each timeline she abandons when she travels back to reset hers: what happens to all the other people, all their lives that get reset? At some points, Smale demonstrates how tiny changes in Cassandra’s actions inadvertently ripple out in a butterfly effect to alter the courses of lives of people she didn’t even intend to affect. That’s an awesome responsibility. Moreover, what if there were two people with this ability wielding it at the same time? A kind of time travellers’ duel, if you will? Frightening.

Oh, I’m supposed to be reviewing the book, you say? Oops. I guess you could say this is my praise for Cassandra in Reverse: it does what any good time-travel story should do, which is get me thinking about the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nature of time travel!

I also have conditional praise for the portrayal of an autistic protagonist in Cassandra. I say conditional because I’m allistic, so it’s not really my lane to evaluate Cassandra as autistic representation. The dearth of autistic representation in mainstream fiction means that, inevitably, we put too much pressure on individual instances of own-voices rep to capture every nuance of identities that are necessarily not monolithic. Cassandra is one particular portrayal of one particular experience of being an autistic woman in English society—and it’s a portrayal that I suspect won’t satisfy some autistic people. At the same time, I hope others feel very seen by what Cassandra undergoes in this book.

Speaking only from my perspective as an allistic yet neurodivergent woman: I really liked how Smale captures how much our society is not designed for autistic people. Cassandra is very sensitive to smells, very much likes having all of her things in the right place, has trouble reading people’s emotional states, etc.—traits that we often dismiss or outright mock, usually in ableist ways. Told from her first-person perspective, however, her experiences are less about stereotypes and more about an accounting of the struggle to exist in a society that’s constantly gaslighting you simply for who you are.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Cassandra’s interactions with her coworkers. I am so happy that Cassandra ends up finding a friend in one of them—watching that relationship grow, albeit iteratively as Cassandra resets the timeline, was one of the most delightful parts of this book. The rest of her coworkers are incredibly ableist in the most dull ways. There were moments when I groaned because it felt like they were caricatures, almost, or at least not sketched in great detail. That being said, towards the end of the book we see moments of greater depth from some of them (like Barry), and I do appreciate that.

Then we have Cassandra’s relationships with her boyfriend and sister. It’s doubly hard for me to comment on the former, because not only am I not autistic but I’m also aromantic (although maybe in this case that means I can at least better approximate Cassandra’s confusion about what Will expects from her, because I would feel much the same, I suspect). Suffice it to say, Cassandra’s attempts to “fix” things with Will are, as far as I understand, a very real if painful portrayal of how our society makes autistic people feel broken for not fitting into the moulds and roles we expect in these areas of life. In the same way, the rift between Cassandra and her sister exists for several reasons—notably the trauma following their parents’ untimely deaths—yet Cassanda’s undiagnosed autism lurks at the heart of those reasons.

Again, Smale’s point is not that Cassandra is the broken one but rather that our society is broken. I fear that some allistic readers will pick up this book, read a couple of chapters, and put it down, deriding Cassandra as an annoying or anal character, calling her unlikable—precisely the reaction, essentially, of the coworkers and clients in this book. If you stick around, you’ll see what Smale is doing, I hope. You’ll see how Cassandra is using time travel as the ultimate masking tool.

Which is why I don’t know how I feel about the ending.

No, actually, I think I really don’t like the ending.

I’m not going to spoil it. I don’t want to discuss it here in that much detail. But I can describe how it made me feel: ambivalent, and now as I write this review slightly betrayed. Maybe I am misunderstanding Smale’s theme, or maybe I just don’t see how this ending ultimately caps that theme. From where I sit, unfortunately, the ending seems to undermine it—establishing that Cassandra is as doomed as her counterpart from Greek mythology, essentially. I don’t know—if you liked the ending or want to share your interpretation of it, hit me up on Twitter and let’s chat.

Cassandra in Reverse has its rough patches, to be sure. Many of the deliberate artistic choices on Smale’s part (the repetitive structure, the portrayal of Cassandra’s autism) will make this book less enjoyable for some readers. Yet it is those same choices that make this book memorable, unique, valuable, in my opinion. Smale sets out to say something interesting, and her take on a time-travel story involving romance and family drama and dealing with trauma deserves definitely got me thinking about all of these things.

This was my first book of Smale's to read so I was not completely sure what to expect.

It did take me some time to get in to Cassandra in Reverse because the whole concept of the book was a bit of a mind bender for me. For someone who doesn't typically read magical realism, it just was a bit of a struggle. Once I finally just let myself read and not worry so much then I was able to get in to the book.

I did find so much of Cassandra's life so sad. I did get that she had lots of obstacles to overcome and had done well considering.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own

Cassandra lives her life in a predictable way until she is dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job, and finds that her local cafe is out of the muffins she likes. This would make anyone upset, but she finds out that she can travel back in time. Now she has the ability to change everything that broke in her predictable life. What could possibly go wrong?

Cassandra on several occasions is referred to as being on the spectrum. There are many things that point to this: her need for sameness, her discomfort with social situations, her trouble making eye contact, her sensory difficulties, her literal language interpretations, and her problems with change. She still has feelings and worries, but the ones she has doesn't dovetail with most of society. They see her as odd or cold as a result when she feels deeply and is overwhelmed easily. When she first discovers that she can go back in time, her first thought is to undo the biggest horror of her life, her parents' deaths in a car accident. But she can only go back four months, which was the start of her relationship with Will and the start of the publicity campaign that failed and got her fired. Of course, she tries to redo all her "mistakes" and make it "better," but there are consequences to her actions that she doesn't understand right away.

Time travel here is only within Cassandra's lifetime, and only within the four-month period. The changes she made rippled out in a butterfly effect, and she realized too late that not all of the changes lined up properly. This makes for a very disjointed experience in the world around her, and we see how that realization hits her. In the end, she does fix relationships, but it's not the one she thought she had to save. She's more comfortable with herself and her abilities in general, not just her time-traveling skill. It's such a fun concept, and I loved how everything came together at the end of the book.

Time travel plots will always get me to pick up a book. I wish I had ignored this one. It's pretty much a chick lit novel that happens to have a time travel twist. The main plot isn't all that interesting and though it's cool that the protagonist is neurodivergent, she is annoying as hell. Little things go wrong and she completely overreacts. She travels back in time to fix minor "hiccups" and, of course, makes things worse half the time. Overall, the novel was a slog to get to the end and I only kept going for the sake of finishing, not because I was invested in any of it.

I loved this story, heartwarming and poignant. It's well plotted and there's plenty of social remarks and food for thought.
Cassandra is a character I loved: a neuro-divergent woman with few social skill, very few filter and a passion for mythology.
Cassandra is also able to time travel and she wants to travel back in time to solve her current issues: being left by her lover and being fired.
This is the start of a unique, well plotted, humorous and emotional story.
The author is an excellent storyteller and I can't wait to read a new book. This one kept me turning pages and I read it in one sitting.
Lovely, compeling, highly recommended.
Many thanks to MIRA for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This was an interesting ride!
Cassandra in Reverse is an exploration of perception, interpersonal relationships, neurochemistry, and so much more.
This story dives so deeply into our main character, allowing the reader to relate to her and her struggles, even if they aren't our own.
Experiencing Cassandra navigate through the world endears her to the reader, but also makes the reader protective of her and frustrated that the world doesn't show Cassandra the respect she deserves.
There's a science fiction element to this story the allows for fantastic character development and growth, though at times it can cause confusion for the reader.
Overall, this was an entertaining, but also eye opening, story and one I am happy to have read.

Thank you @htpbooks for the copy of CASSANDRA IN REVERSE. This one is out now!

I really enjoyed this time loop story. The characters were well developed and I found it easy to love them. This one made me laugh out loud and warmed my heart. If you’re looking for a fun escape read this summer, this one is for you!

I liked the premise of this book when reading the synopsis. I thought I’d love it because of the time travel element.

I liked the beginning but it was not so much time travel as Groundhog Day, I liked that Cassandra is neurodivergent.

I just couldn’t go on reading as it became too repetitive for me and while I thought the Greek Mythology facts were interesting at first they became a bit over done.

Maybe I’ll continue in a few weeks and see if my mind gets changed but for now I had to stop. It just wasn’t as good as I thought for me personally.

A time-loop story that exceeded all my expectations! I can’t stop thinking about it.

After getting dumped by her boyfriend and fired from her PR job in the same day, Cassandra Dankworth miraculously gains the ability to manipulate time from the past four months. And she'll do anything to fix her mistakes!

I absolutely ADORED Cassandra. With her passion for Greek mythology threaded throughout, she was such a delight. I loved being in her wonderfully quirky head and genuinely laughed out loud multiple times!

But Cassandra is often misunderstood by others. She's unintentionally brash, prefers predictable situations, and frequently misses social cues. A very big part of this story is piecing together her experiences as a neurodivergent person.

What I loved most was the mysterious detour it leads Cassandra on—one with a surprising twist and a much bigger purpose than she intended. The utterly heartfelt, vulnerable moments along the way made my heart so full.

It’s hard to encapsulate how this book made me feel after finishing. An easy five stars!

Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale is a quirky and fun women's fiction about a unique neurodivergent heroine who is stuck in a time loop.

Full of Greek Mythology references, this book was a delight to read.

In my opinion, a good book should evoke some sort of response from the reader. At first, this story gave me a headache, with all of the back and forth and repetition of time. I am glad I persevered and read the whole book because it turned out to be quite a good read in the end. I particularly liked Cassandra’s growth through trying to manipulate time and make things better for herself by controlling situations where she felt she could have a better outcome. Thank you NetGalley for providing the ARC.

This was a fantastic read with a compelling lead character and a time travel plot that is reminiscent of magical realism. A truly stunning read.

Anytime I see a new book pop up with a time travel theme, I'm automatically excited to read it. I'm a bit obsessed with time travel, and frankly, there isn't enough out there to whet my voracious appetite for it. Let me start off by saying that Cassandra in Reverse started off with a bang.

Cassandra, the main character, has some great philosophical, original thoughts that effortlessly pulled me into the story. As she begins her narration, she even breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the reader. It was a really promising first impression, and even better, she only became more interesting the more I read. I could see how many people might be frustrated or annoyed with her horrible interactions with everyone around her. After all, she hasn't a clue how to engage in small talk or polite, casual conversation. She inevitably manages to offend or anger the person she is speaking to-completely unintentionally. Still, for me, her clumsiness at personal and professional relationships made me feel so sympathetic towards her struggles. The author spent a lot of time explaining Cassandra's differences, daily challenges, and feelings of despair that she couldn't stop pushing people away. Based on all of these things, it became crystal clear very early on that Cassandra is autistic, but was never diagnosed.

The book begins with her getting fired from her job, getting dumped by her boyfriend, and her living situation with her roommates is pretty well destroyed. So far, it was reminding me very strongly of Penny Reid's Neanderthal Seeks Human just without the huge dose of humor. (One of my top favorite books, btw) Cassandra doesn't care much for her PR job in the first place, considering she just isn't a people person. However, nobody wants to be fired and lose their financial stability, so she is naturally distraught. Even more upsetting is her unexpected break-up with her lovely boyfriend Will of four months. She truly cares for Will, and was completely blindsided by his sudden extraction from their relationship. Will seemed to genuinely admire Cassandra's intelligence and wasn't put off by her differences. What seemed to be a breaking point for him was her issue with opening up to him about her feelings and sharing herself with him. No matter how many times he asked her to share what she was thinking and feeling, she didn't know how to give that to him.

Somewhere after this disaster of a day when her life implodes, she discovers that she inexplicably went back and started repeating the day over again. She's stunned to discover that she has a strange ability to manipulate time, rewinding moments and re-doing them to fix what she feels like she broke. The catch is that she can only go back to the beginning of that one day and no further. This time travel aspect is left pretty vague and not at all fleshed out. The rules seem arbitrary and erratic, fluid even. But putting that aside, if you suspend disbelief and explore the yawning possibilities with her, there's still potential.

She struggles with questions of morality: should she even be re-doing so many failures with Will in order to prevent their break-up? If she keeps rewinding situations that end badly until Will is happy with her, isn't that a form of control and manipulation? Eventually, it doesn't sit well with her. She briefly thinks about doing illegal things just because she can and then erasing them, but she is an honest person at heart so she discards the possibility. In the end, what she cares most about is finding out where she went wrong with Will, preventing herself from getting fired, and preventing the day with her roommate Derek that ruins everything at home. So she begins an exhausting effort to reset everything. Along the way, she starts to learn things about herself as well as start to become more friendly with Salini and Sophie. Unfortunately, even with some successes, she keeps hitting walls when it comes to Will and the mystery woman named Diana that keeps popping up no matter what she changes. She starts to think that the harder she tries to put things back together again, perhaps she's just better off letting things fall where they may and accepting her life, flaws and all.

The mystery woman, Diana, set the story on a whole new course that I was not expecting. After Cassandra's reconciliation with her, the storyline with Will is completely altered. At first, I was extremely annoyed. After all, wasn't this book partially a romance? Now it wasn't feeling like one so much. Then the more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that maybe there was a reason she and Will keep having issues in every alternate reality she creates. As sweet as he is, perhaps they really are too different, and she was wrong about fate. She can keep altering it, but in the end, things will eventually realign in the way they were meant to go. Different journey, same results. So I adjusted my thinking about her new projected ending. This is all about her deciding not to time travel anymore because she finally accepts herself for who she is, differences and all. Except...she starts making mistakes again with Diana, time traveling again to fix it (after declaring that she won't anymore), and then deciding to contradict everything she claimed to have learned and start COMPLETELY over again.

By the end, I was left floundering. I wondered what the lesson was. What was the message, the timeline of anything, the takeaway from everything I just read...? It's so unfortunate, but the promising beginning fizzled out to confusion in the final chapters. Everything I thought the book was about changed to something else, then left completely unresolved and undone. I decided on three stars, but this really was a tough one to rate. I enjoyed the author's writing style a lot, unfortunately the execution left something to be desired. Also, a minor complaint I have is the excessive references/comparisons to ancient Greek Gods. I understand that it was Cassandra's obsession, but there were so many insertions into the story that it became boring and I started skimming over them.

I wish I could have loved this one more, but I ended up having very mixed feelings. I will say that despite my issues, this was an original concept that held my interest pretty much the whole way through. I might be willing to give this author another try in the future if the right synopsis catches my eye again.

CASSANDRA IN REVERSE by Holly Smale is a rollicking, wild adventure through the eyes of Cassandra, a young woman cursed/blessed to repeat the last 4 months of her life until she changes her fate -- which she attempts with spirit, creativity, and remarkable resolve, addressing flatmate issues, work problems, and a romantic relationship gone wrong. While I did not have any connection with the whiny, brutally honest Cassandra at the start, revelations throughout changed my perspective on a woman changing the course of time and her reality through tremendous personal change and ingenuity. I received a copy of this book and these are my own, unbiased opinions.

“I do not set my life on fire and run away from somebody I hate. Where would be the logic in that? Hate is never what the matches are made of.”

If you had the power to change the past…would you?

Cassandra Penelope Dankworth is a creature of habit. She likes what she likes (museums, jumpsuits, her boyfriend, Will) and strongly dislikes what she doesn’t (mess, change, her boss drinking out of her mug). Her life runs in a pleasing, predictable order…until now.

* She’s just been dumped.
* She’s just been fired.
* Her local café has run out of banana muffins.

Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can go back and change the past. Now, Cassie should be able to find a way to fix the life she accidentally obliterated. And with time on her side, how hard can it be?

This was not my favorite time travel book. In fact, I’m not even sure that I fully understood the time travel aspect or how it added to the story. I did very much enjoy Cassandra’s character and how well her autistic tendencies were explained. But all of the Greek bits and the back and forth just kind of left my head spinning.

“Banana muffins are comforting. Banana muffins are reassuring and familiar. Banana muffins don’t wake up in the morning and tell you they care about you immensely but just don’t see a future with you anymore.”

Thank you to Netgalley, Mira Books, and the author for the eARC. I voluntarily read and reviewed this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.