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.
Themes
Time and the Multiverse
Wrong Place, Wrong Time abides by the conventions of the mystery thriller. It contains plot twists and red herrings, or false clues. Jen, in her determination to find out an explanation, fulfills the role of the dogged police detective gathering information, running into dead ends, and uncovering the truth. In using the device of a time loop, McAllister upends the conventions of the police procedural genre: The novel not only solves a crime but actually prevents it.
The novel explores the idea of the multiverse. Events play out in alternate realities in endless variations. Propelled into a time loop by love for her son, Jen is guided by her own subconscious, returning to days critical to understanding the murder. The time loop allows her not only to solve the murder but to reflect on herself. She realizes how she was too busy to notice what was happening around her.
Jen fears that she hadn’t been much of a mother. When she has the chance to relive the day her father died alone, sipping beer and watching TV, Jen opts to stay with him. They have the heart-to-heart talk they never had about the heartache of parenting, the demands of child-rearing, and the anxiety every parent has over whether they are up to the job. The time loop gives Jen the chance to see her life in a new light.
Jen’s regret becomes more pressing than her need to solve the mystery. She confronts what her busy life allowed her to ignore. She is touched by the breakfast banter between Todd and Kelly, a breakfast so routine it had never been archived in her memory. She watches her younger self play catch with a three-year-old Todd. Hers had been a wonderful life that she had casually ignored.
Jen’s time loop adventures echo Scrooge’s narrative arc in A Christmas Carol. In addition to solving the mystery of why her son knifes a stranger, she embarks on a journey of personal discovery. In reliving her days, she sees how she didn’t appreciate the richness of her life. She comes to appreciate the routine miracles of love, family, and motherhood. Like Scrooge, she is given a chance at redemption.
The Rewards of Motherhood
At the center of the novel is the story of mothers separated from their children. Eve Green is kidnapped by Jones’s gang, and Jen is emotionally alienated from her son. After giving birth, she considered Todd a mistake and swore off having another child, a possible manifestation of post-partum depression. During her regressions back in time, she asks Todd about his homework, and he is taken aback by her sudden interest. This reveals to Jen how Todd saw her as a mother: busy, emotionally distant, and uninvolved.
As Jen reveals her husband’s true identity, she reveals her own. For all her supposed failures, it is her deep and abiding love for her son that allows her to catapult back in time. She is a caring and loving mother whose dedication to her work was a reflection of—not a substitute—for the love of her son. She braves the anxieties and loneliness of her time jumps to save him.
When she jumps into his 16th birthday, she realizes that she wants to gift him the future: “She can’t let him lose everything” (118). What starts as a murder mystery ends as an affirmation of a mother’s love and willingness to sacrifice everything for her child.
The Power of Love
When Jen wakes up in the past and can’t confide in anyone, she feels a loneliness she couldn’t have imagined. She finds Professor Vettese, whose physics expertise makes him a perfect confidante. The name Vitesse is Italian for “lived.” The professor provides Jen the comfort of someone who understands the concept of reliving the past. Jen thinks to herself how connection is critical: Finding “[s]ome safe space to hold her thoughts up to the light: isn’t that what everybody needs?” (139).
At the heart of the novel is love. When Kelly meets Jen, neither questions that they are soulmates. Meeting Jen is enough to convince Kelly to abandon his dream of helping others as a cop, and meeting Kelly is enough to convince Jen to abandon her lifelong anxiety over risk-taking and commitment.
Maternal love compels Jen to save her son despite the emotional turmoil of the time loop. Love compels Kelly to assume a new persona and smother his Welsh accent to keep Jen safe. Love compels young Todd, who stumbles into love with Clio, to take bold and swift action to protect her from the threat of her uncle’s business partner. As Jen discovers, love compelled her father to handle his sudden widowhood with quiet stoicism.
The novel does not affirm the conventions of a murder mystery: The “bad guys” don’t get punished and the “good guys” are not exonerated. In Jen’s reboot of history, Jones escapes and the crime that Todd will be accused of never happens. In the end, the novel celebrates not the triumph of the law but the triumph of love. Names change, and relationships Jen thought simple are complex. But love is constant: “Jen looks up at her husband, and at her son. Clio. Ryan. Eve. Kelly. People whose names have changed but whose love has endured despite that” (367).
