56 pages • 1 hour read
Sophie CousensThis Time Next Year
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food and Meals
Food and meals are motifs that illustrate the themes of Transformation and Change and The Power of Family and Community Bonds. Minnie’s vocation as a professional chef allows Cousens to use food preparation as symbolic insight into her character and relationships. Minnie calls “baking a pie the perfect kind of flow” (63), and flashback sequences reveal that baking with Connie is one of her fonder memories of her mother, who was “softer somehow when she cooked” (267). Minnie finds success in her first restaurant job only to face sexual harassment at her subsequent work in fine dining. She is fired when Quinn’s then-girlfriend, Polly, finds plastic in her dessert. Quinn also has a miserable evening that night, as Polly breaks up with him due to his unavailability and preoccupation with his mother. Though Quinn and Minnie are at odds at first, his appreciation of her cooking and her business model brings them into further contact. As the two deliver pies together, Quinn tells her that he knows “people need this connection in their day, someone dropping in to see if they’re okay” (79). Though Minnie resents his support of her business as an act of unwanted charity, his support of her is rooted in the fact that her clients remind him of his mother.
Food is also key to Minnie’s personal transformation. She and Quinn bond over simple bacon sandwiches after swimming, leading to greater closeness between them. Minnie finds cooking as a caterer more restful, allowing her to concentrate on herself. Her triumphant wedding feast for Leila and Leila’s toast to her skills underline that Minnie’s community appreciates her work and value. Quinn, too, uses food to accept Minnie as she is, joking with her about their Weetabix picnic as they embark on their new relationship. Throughout the narrative, the characters’ connections to food are a window into relationships and priorities that deepen the novel’s themes.
Animals and Pets
Animals are a motif that recurs as conversation topics and plot elements throughout the text, providing moments of connection and emotional vulnerability that emphasize the themes of The Power of Family and Community Bonds and Time, Luck, and Fate. In the flashback to Quinn’s and Minnie’s births, Connie Cooper demonstrates active labor techniques via animal sounds, telling Tara to “sound like a cow, or better yet, a hippo” (17). Tara eventually imitates Connie’s mooing sounds, and Connie’s coaching helps Tara deliver Quinn one minute before Minnie. This becomes a source of deep bitterness that develops Connie’s sense of anger at the world and belief that Minnie is cursed.
In contrast, for Quinn and Minnie, animals become a source of connection. Tara adopts animals for Quinn’s birthday, leading him to invite Minnie to the zoo. As they watch the penguins, an older man tells them that one penguin is “bringing a stone to his mate as a gift” (214). The man tells them about a penguin who inadvertently fell in love with a cardboard cutout, drawing public attention for his lovesickness. Though Minnie and Quinn bond at the zoo, as their mothers did over animal sounds, Quinn balks at their chemistry and upsets Minnie. Quinn repeatedly returns to the metaphor of the cardboard girl as a way of explaining his inability to be a good romantic prospect.
Minnie’s cat, Lucky, reveals a letter from Quinn asking for another chance, underlining how animals continue to connect their families after their mothers become friends. The letter is partially destroyed because Lucky used the doormat as a litterbox, continuing the motif of recurring mishaps, but Minnie perseveres. The animal motif persists as Minnie compares her romantic chemistry with Quinn to “a nest of baby owls long dormant in her stomach [that] had all woken up at once and started flapping their wings” (79). Minnie feels this same chemistry at the end of the novel, more assured and less unsettled.
Time and Clocks
The passage of time and reflections on the past are motifs that are fundamental to the novel’s structure and its character development. Minnie grows up hearing the story of her birth not as an occasion for joy but as a story that brings on a “pained expression” or “solemn reverence.” In the flashback sequences, midnight takes on particular significance: Quinn sees Minnie shortly after midnight at the restaurant she has just been fired from and compares her to Cinderella as she flees the scene. Quinn and Minnie kiss at midnight as teenagers, only for Quinn to take a call from Tara before he can learn Minnie’s name. Quinn likes to watch the sunrise alone on his birthday, underlining his isolation and need for space. Minnie is most optimistic about January 2, what she calls the “day farthest from her birthday” (60).
Minnie’s father, Bill, obsesses over repairing clocks, as if restoring order to timepieces can soothe his unspoken feelings about Minnie’s birth and Connie’s pessimism. Bill sells one of his prized clocks to finance Minnie’s new business, doing the same to support Connie’s new midwifery career. Bill, like Quinn, learns to let go of the past to focus on his future.
Leila’s recurring question every New Year’s Eve about hopes for the coming year is another example of this motif. Minnie asks Quinn the question at the end of the novel, underlining her newly hopeful attitude toward the future. Quinn realizes that they have met before when Minnie uses the phrase “lemming o’clock,” which underlines that the real fate in the novel was not Minnie’s run of bad luck but rather the series of choices and circumstances that brought her to Quinn.
