48 pages • 1 hour read
Gillian McAllisterWrong Place Wrong Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Time Travel Stories
In some ways, Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a time travel novel, a long-established subgenre of sci-fi fantasy. Often dated to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the genre of time travel became a staple of sci-fi: Characters board a vehicle or perhaps tumble into a different dimension through a previously unseen portal, or fall into a deep sleep and wake up in the past or future. McCallister’s work, however, is not so much a time travel novel as a time loop novel.
In a time loop novel, time is less linear than it is curved, with characters repeating the same period of time. A number of critically acclaimed television series feature time loops, most notably Netflix’s Russian Doll (2019-2020), an influence that McAllister acknowledges in her closing Note. A number of films also feature time loops, such as the romcom Palm Springs (2020), the slasher comedy Happy Death Day (2017), and the film Groundhog Day (1993), which Jen repeatedly invokes when trying to explain her dilemma.
Novels with time loops include A Week of Mondays (Jessica Brody, 2016), In a Holidaze (Christina Lauren, 2020), This Time Tomorrow (Emma Straub, 2022), and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton, 2018). The time loop genre coopts the theoretical possibility of a multiverse, where there are multiple versions of reality. Works featuring time loops suggest that characters have control over their lives, and that they can learn from experience to shape a better reality. They contrast with conventional novels, where time is linear.
Philosophical Context: The Nature of the Self
Wrong Place, Wrong Time is driven by a question that has challenged moral and ethical philosophers: Can a person change?
The debate over character change is long—the Greek philosopher Aristotle doubted a person could change; Christian philosophers believed change could be brought about only through divine intervention; Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, taught generations of psychologists that real change was dubious, that a person should be content with being aware of the root of their problematic choices.
The novel is a drama of personal redemption. It echoes the story of Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol (1843), who travels in time with three ghosts and becomes a better person. Like Scrooge, Jen is a flawed character. In her case, she feels guilty for being an ineffective mother, a distant wife, and someone addicted to work. Through her time loop adventure, she comes to understand, as Scrooge does, the importance of love and the need for human connection. She experiences a similar moment of redemption and realizes she has been given a second chance.
