When the World Tips Over

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to mental illness, substance use and addiction, sexual assault, death, violence and child abuse.

Cassidy is one of the young protagonists of the book and one of the most frequent point-of-view characters. In the present moment of the story, she is 19 years old. She has deferred her admission to Stanford University in order to investigate the family she has just learned she is related to, which brings her to the town of Paradise Springs and into the lives of her siblings.

Miles describes Cassidy’s aesthetic as “Hippie meets punk meets biker” (43). When she meets Miles, she has patches on her jeans, a skull T-shirt, ankle bracelet and toe rings, metal piercings in her ears, and a leather motorcycle jacket. Her long, curly hair is dyed in rainbow colors, and she has words and phrases tattooed all over her body. Cassidy loves words and their meanings; she adores stories in general, and she loves to read. When Miles first finds her, the front seat of her truck is covered in books, and she’s holding a novel by John Steinbeck. From the time she was young, Cassidy used to sneak things her mother wrote and stored in what Cassidy called her bag of words.