I was between audiobooks, so I started scrolling through my library app for inspiration when I stumbled across this gem.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Cassandra is having a really bad day. It started with her wonderful boyfriend dumping her, followed by her boss firing her.
She’s also not getting along with her roommates and they’re probably going to kick her out soon. And finding another place without a job will be tough.
So imagine Cassandra’s surprise when her boyfriend shows up and takes her to dinner at the exact same place he took her the night before, at the exact same table, with the exact same waitress, etc.
Turns out she accidentally went back in time to get dumped and fired all over again.
OK, so getting dumped and fired twice is not good. But Cassandra immediately realizes that if she can control her ability to travel back in time (which she can,) she might be able to avoid getting dumped or fired at all.
She tries to go back ten years to the day her parents died in a car crash so she can stop that from happening, but she only manages to go back four months — to the day she met her boyfriend.
Hilarity quickly ensues. Yes, she reconnects with her boyfriend and they start dating again, but it turns out starting all over is trickier than it seems.
Every time something goes even a little bit wrong, Cassandra rewinds time so she can do something different and avoid the awkwardness. It becomes apparent pretty early on that she’s abusing the privilege, but who wouldn’t when you can literally take back that nasty thing you just snapped at your coworker even if you didn’t really mean it?
At one point Cassandra has some qualms about the morality of what she’s doing, but that never stops her from doing it.
I should also say that, at the end of the book, Cassandra is diagnosed as “highly-functioning autistic” and I was surprised that she was surprised. People around her kept saying she was “on the spectrum” and she just imagined herself sliding down a rainbow, which I thought was a pretty cute way of interpreting that phrase.
At the same time, it does make it harder for her to connect with the people around her, hence the romance/job/roommate issues. Also, she works in PR and she hates talking to people, so she just shouldn’t be in PR.
That was one thing that did not strike true for me. She picked her first career very carefully and meticulously, researched it, realized it wouldn’t work, so she chose her next career randomly.
Yet nothing about Cassandra says she’s the type of person to choose something randomly. That leaves too many things up to chance, which means they are outside of her control, and that’s terrifying.
I don’t want to give away whether Cassandra is successful in getting her boyfriend to stay with her this time, or boss to not fire her, or her roommates to keep her around. I will say I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I think it did a great job of balancing the funny with the sweet. There were a lot of laughs, but also a lot of moments that genuinely tugged on my heartstrings.