Spotlight & Giveaway: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Holly Smale’s new release: Cassandra in Reverse

If you had the power to change the past, where would you start?

Cassandra Penelope Dankworth likes what she likes, and strongly dislikes what she doesn’t. Her life runs in a pleasing, predictable order…until all these things happen on the same day:

• She gets dumped.
• She gets fired
• Her local café runs out of her favorite muffins

Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can travel back in time and change the past.

She decides to use this newfound ability to change all the broken parts of her life. Get undumped, unfired. And with time on her side, how hard can it be?

“What feels at first like an unconventional romantic comedy develops into something quite different and extraordinary…. Readers will only regret that they can’t close their eyes and experience it for the first time all over again.” -BOOKREPORTER.COM

“Cassandra’s first-person narration is caustic, vulnerable, and laugh-out-loud funny as she time-jumps with a rapidity most people reserve for channel surfing. Smale’s expanded take on the Groundhog Day concept is a wildly fun journey of self-discovery”—Shelf Awareness

Reese’s Book Club June Pick
An Apple Must Listens Pick, a Best of Pick from Amazon, Country Living, Tor.com, GoodReads, Gizmodo, and more
 

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from Cassandra in Reverse 

“Another coffee?” The waitress hovers next to me like a monochrome hummingbird and I can feel the blue impatience pouring out of her. In my defense, the café is not that busy. In her defense, I’ve been picking at the same banana muffin and sipping the dregs of a cold coffee now for seventy-five minutes.
“Mint tea, please.” I finger my watch again. “Thank you.”

Where is Will? Did I get the time wrong? I spent a few hours preparing for this moment, hunting through secondhand shops for a new vintage outfit, getting uncomfortably changed in a toilet cubicle and then furtively applying tester makeup in Boots, but now I’m starting to worry I’ve ruined everything already. What if I’ve knocked everything off course? What if the amazing blue tulle dress I’m now wearing is the thing that changes the universe? What if my black jumpsuit is actually the most attractive thing about me? More importantly, what if, by applying for reasons of hygiene only the makeup colors that haven’t been tested yet, I’ve made myself look like a drunk butterfly?
I’m just rifling through my bag for something to either confirm or refute this hypothesis when the door tinkles again and my skin fills with warm light, like a dark room with the curtain tugged open.
From under my eyelashes, I watch as Will approaches the counter.
I study him as he orders a cappuccino with extra chocolate and beams casually at the waitress, then bends down and deliberates between the baked goods, even though I already know he’ll pick a Black Forest cupcake. I watch him as he waits for his coffee, hands slung in his pockets with his thumbs on the seams, illogically scanning the menu on the wall even though he’s already ordered. I watch him straighten his posture and press the little dark curl down on his neck, the exact lock of hair that tickles my nose when I lean up against his warm back in the morning.
And I’m suddenly certain: this is now how I want to spend my time.
Correction: my times.
Because Will isn’t just any old boyfriend to me, one of the twenty-three men I’ve briefly dated over the last decade: another name on a double-sided A4 list of Simons and Patricks and Sams and Joes. He’s not disposable, a paper-plate human, one I can throw away and replace with an identical version when we’re done.
And I can’t keep being told, over and over again, that something about me is shaped wrong, unable to fit others, incapable of “connecting,” like a jigsaw piece with the edges sanded down.
(“Cassandra does not play well with others.”)
All I want is enough time to try.
Breath held, I watch as Will picks up his coffee and cupcake and—
Shit.
With lightning reflexes I didn’t even know I had, I grab my handbag off the chair and plop it on the floor next to me. Then I blow gently on my mint tea, pick up my book and wait as patiently as I can while Will quickly scans the café for a seat: assessing, deliberating, discarding. Our first meeting was perfect—it needs no alteration and no editing—and I can suddenly feel the monster rising, the water roaring, the horse soaring, the sword swinging: our story, starting again.
Except, this time, I’ll find a way to reach across the gap.
Will walks toward me.
“Hi there.” He smiles, exactly as he did the first time round. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
“SURE.”

That’s all I have to say. It’s not Euripides—I’m not winning any competitions—but it worked last time: got the right man in the right seat at the right time. But I can’t do it. My lips are stuck together, my tongue is limp; the muscles in my throat click uselessly, like an engine trying to start. I feel like the Minotaur: part human, with the head of an animal that cannot speak, desperately trying to communicate.
Horrified, I stare at Will with circular bull eyes.
“No problem.” He smiles after what feels like an eternity but is actually eight seconds. “Sorry to bother you. I’ll sit somewhere else.”
Which he does, and our love story is promptly over.
The end.
***
So I try again. Licking my lips, I close my eyes and focus as hard as I can on the moment just before I screwed everything up. When I open them, Will is standing over me again, smiling.

Abrupt joy rushes through me.
This is—by far—the best unasked-for gift I have ever been given.

“Yes,” I say in relief.
“No problem.” Will dips his head slightly. “Sorry to bother you. I’ll sit somewhere else.”
I blink, trying to understand what just—
“No!” I shout urgently as he walks away. “No! I meant no, I don’t mind! Come back! Please sit with me!”
But he’s gone—very gone—and our story is done.
Which is fine: I’ll just try again.

“Hi there.” Will smiles as I wait with my carefully prepared word held in my mouth like a hard-boiled sweet. “Do you—”

“No,” I say urgently, then realize I’ve just jumped my cue.
He sits somewhere else.

Again.

My panicked face rejects Will for me.

Again.

He hesitates a fraction too long, and a woman with banana bread veers around him, nabbing the chair.

Again.

I can’t look at him, so he apologizes and sits somewhere else.

Again.
***

My limbs are in the wrong order: I am a plastic Halloween skeleton, put together by a small child. I try to rearrange—an elbow, an ankle, a femur, a coccyx—but now my fingers are twitching, one at a time, as if I’m playing invisible scales on the world’s tiniest piano. Sure sure sure, all I need to say is sure sure sure, but the word sure no longer exists, it’s a made-up word, and I’ve ruined it, I’ve ruined everything again, why can’t I get anything—
“Hi there.” Will smiles. “Do you— Oh my God, are you okay?”
I’ve just burst into tears.

Conclusion: I cannot do this. It doesn’t matter how many times I hop back in time, or how simple this process is supposed to be. It doesn’t matter that our original meet-cute was flawless and I just need to repeat it, or that all I’ve got to do is get this man to bloody sit down.
The harder I try, the farther away from me Will moves.
At one point, the look I give him from across the room is so intense, so accidentally hostile, he simply asks for a take-out cup and leaves. I’d naively assumed that this first meeting would be easy. Put two people who find each other attractive back in the same place at the same time in the same controlled environment and you’ll get the same results, right?
But apparently time doesn’t work like that.
It sets us up together, over and over again—like a DJ at a col
lege disco when the slow songs come on—and then I step in like a taciturn headmistress and ruin it before the dance even starts. Time is so incredibly fragile. It’s like tissue paper, like gos¬samer, like a spider’s web in the corner of a kitchen cupboard. One wrong move, a little bit of pressure, the head of a broom, and the narrative disintegrates.
And one thing is becoming abundantly clear: it is me. I am no longer able to pretend that I am not the problem here. I can
not delude myself into thinking that I am the victim, the un-deserving casualty of bad romantic luck, the poor princess tied to a rock in chains against her will.
I am making the rock, over and over again; they are my chains.
Thanks to my new gift, I am literally watching myself repel my future boyfriend away from me over and over again, and it’s making me wonder just how many people I’ve done this to in my life already, without even realizing it. How many people have I repelled with the wrong word in the wrong tone at the wrong time, with a hostile or blank facial expression, an in
ability to make eye contact? How many people were supposed to be in my life before I accidentally sent them spiraling away?
And it’s this realization—that it’s my problem, and therefore one that I can solve—that snaps me out of it.
I am getting my first date with Will again if it kills me.
Which—given how many banana muffins I’ve eaten in a row and how exhausted I am now—it might feasibly do.
This time, I manage to rewind a little further.
I give myself a few minutes of preparatory pep talk—you are Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons—tuck my bob neatly be
hind my ears, apply some lip gloss, brush the muffin crumbs from where they’re sitting in a neat little line in my cleavage like they’re waiting for the post office to open.
Then I jump up and switch seats, taking the one opposite me instead.
A relieved stillness rushes through me, the way my leg feels when it finally stops bouncing up and down. Sometimes all I need is the shock of change to break me out of a loop of my own creation.
I look at my fingers: my tiny imaginary piano has gone. I can do this. I’ve done it successfully once before, so logically I can do it again. Will fancies me from the moment he sees me:
I know he does—he’s told me. This is going to work. I’d say it’s destiny, but if the last forty minutes have taught me anything, it’s that fate is an entirely made-up human construct, like wed
dings, gender reveals and birthday parties.
The doorbell rings. Will enters, orders his coffee; selects his cupcake; gazes at the menu; turns around, deliberates and—
“Hi there.” He points at the chair that used to be mine. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
“Go ahead.” I nod calmly, barely glancing up.
Will sits down and pulls out his battered old laptop, and I have to resist a sudden, overwhelming urge to warn him that he’s going to spill an entire mug of black coffee on it in about three weeks’ time and lose a lot of very important files. Although he’ll also take this disaster in his stride so beautifully, and with such great humor and graciousness, it’ll make me fall for him just a little bit more.
Conscientiously, I return to fake-reading my book.
That sense of déjà vu is back: a familiar clatter of cups behind the counter, a door being slammed, the delivery of my mint tea, a baby starting to cry. It’s all exactly as it was the first time again, as if time has a preferred route—a mild-voiced but bossy GPS—and our detour is now over. All I have to do is exactly what I did the first time round, which means that in five, four, three, two, one—
“Wow.” Will looks up from his computer. “That’s quite some book for a Wednesday evening.”
With a delay to suggest I’m engrossed, I look up. “Is it?”
“The Iliad?” Will grins widely, and I notice the sweet gap between his front teeth, just as I did the first time round. “That’s more Thursday or Friday reading material, surely.”
“Not at all.” I smile back. “I try to save later in the week for other books written by a member of the Simpson family.”
“I’ve heard Bart’s version of King Lear is extraordinary.”
“Not a patch on Paradise Lost by Maggie.”
We both laugh and I feel it: something warm and rosy and pink, reaching across the table between us like fingertips. Apparently the obscene strength of my long-term memory is “kind of creepy”—and the weakness of my short-term memory “extremely irritating”—but I am abruptly grateful for the ability to remember this entire conversation, word for word.
It means I have a preapproved script to follow: one I already know works.
“You’ve traveled a lot,” I say, precisely on cue.
Will looks up again in surprise, so I point at the battered stickers plastered all over his doomed laptop. Thailand. Australia. The Philippines. Iceland. I did make this observation last time too, but I feel a lot more confident in the assertion now I know the story behind every single one of them.
“Not really.” Will beams, and something in my stomach abruptly glows. “I just like pretty and painfully stylish strangers in coffee shops to think I do. Sadly, my I’m A Very Interesting Person sticker fell off last week.”
I stare at him with round eyes.
Umm, he was supposed to say, “I have, yes, mostly for work, what about you? And then I say, No, actually, I haven’t left England for a decade, and he says, Oh, that’s such a shame, why not? and I say, I’ve had nobody to go with and also the sun gives me painful hives and immediately regret it.
I cannot believe Will Baker has gone off script already.
“I…” What sticker? What’s he talking about? “Me? Am I the pretty stranger?”
“Yes.” Will scratches his head. “Sorry. That was a joke, and also a desperate attempt to flirt with you. I’ve been out of the dating game quite a while. Can you tell?”
“Yes,” I confirm. “That was bloody awful.”
Will bursts out laughing and I feel my entire body relax in relief.
“Can I start again?” He assesses me with a slightly different expression on his face, but I have absolutely no idea what it could be. “My official answer is yes, I travel a lot. Mostly for work. What about you?”
“Umm.” I decide to correct this thread immediately. “Not so much. My job is…mainly London-centric.”
“What do you do? Is it around here?”
“A PR agency just around the corner. What about you?”
I don’t think we talk enough, as a species, about how ridiculously difficult it is to make basic conversation. People act like it should be fun, but it isn’t. It’s like playing tennis, and you have to stay permanently perched on the balls of your feet just to work out where the ball is coming from and where it’s supposed to go next. Is it their turn? My turn? Will I get there fast enough? Have I missed my shot? Did I just interrupt theirs? Am I hogging the ball? Is this a gentle back-and-forth rally, just to waste time, or would they prefer one of us to just smack it into the corner?
It’s exhausting even when I don’t know all the answers already.
.
It’s becoming rapidly clear that I can stick to the script as much as I like, but Will isn’t going to. He functions on an almost entirely ad hoc, momentary basis, saying and doing what he feels at any given moment, with no respect at all for the pencil drafts of his alternative existences.
This is going to be a lot trickier than I originally thought.

Excerpt. ©Holly Smale. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

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Meet the Author:

Holly Smale has been writing stories since she was four years old. Her path to publication included teen-modelling, factory-work, PR, teaching in Japan and a chaotic stint as the world’s worst waitress, along with a BA in English Literature and an MA in Shakespeare from Bristol University. She uses neither of these qualifications , but still brings them up at parties. Her debut children’s novel, GEEK GIRL has sold 3.4 million books in 30 languages. It is currently in development with Netflix. At the age of 39, Holly was diagnosed as both autistic and dyspraxic. She writes and speaks passionately about neurodiversity and a lot of random topics she’s not really qualified to talk about yet does anyway.

Her debut adult novel, CASSANDRA IN REVERSE is a Reese’s Book Club Pick, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and the Aardvark Book Club pick. She lives in Hove, England.
https://twitter.com/HolSmale?

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