47 pages • 1 hour read
Breanne RandallThe Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8-Interlude 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
While Aunt Tava hasn’t told Gigi she is coming, Gigi senses it and adds mayflower to the fire, which symbolizes welcoming unexpected visitors. Seth and Raquel join the reunion, followed by Aunt Kay. Jake arrives for dinner, having been invited by Aunt Tava. Aunt Anne arrives. Anne and Gigi cook together, and they all begin drinking wine. Uncle Brian arrives. The family eats dinner together. When they finish, Gigi says they should talk about the reason everyone has come: her impending death. Gigi tells the family that she doesn’t have long, and that she wants to enjoy the time together. Jake attempts to talk to Sadie, but she becomes distracted thinking about a rare flower, Mount Diablo buckwheat, that grows on a hill outside town. The flower is a symbol of love and reputed to be the source of the Revelare family’s magic. Sadie tells Jake they’ll talk later, deciding she needs to retrieve the flower as part of her plan to heal Gigi.
Interlude 8 Summary
This interlude is a recipe for a cherry cheese pie. Gigi’s first-person introduction describes it as a foolproof recipe that Seth always liked, though Sadie never did.
Chapter 9 Summary
Sadie, Raquel, and Seth go to Wild Rose Hill to collect the flowers. As they pick them, they hear a growl and feel a presence, and a voice tells them to “get out.” They run and escape the mountain. When they arrive home, Seth offers to help Sadie prepare the spell the next morning. The next morning, Seth helps Sadie collect a crow’s egg from the tree to symbolize life from death. They compile and burn the ingredients, leaving a knot of Isis that they need to get Gigi to wear.
When they give Gigi the knot, she tells them that she feels better, but that it will only delay the inevitable. She wants to die on her own terms. Sadie goes to work in the café and remains hopeful when she sees Gigi’s level of energy, despite her Aunt Tava and Seth’s skepticism. Sadie begins to feel guilty about leaving Jake when he wanted to talk to her, and she goes to his house. They embrace, again overcome by their attraction, but he interrupts to tell her that he is engaged. Jake tells Sadie he wanted to come back to Poppy Meadows, but had heard Sadie was engaged to someone else. By the time he realized that wasn’t true, he’d met Bethany and she had become pregnant.
Jake tells her that he wanted to enjoy the time with Sadie before Bethany arrived. She asks why he left the city, and he tells her about a drug turf war and meeting a family in which a 10-year-old had almost overdosed on cocaine. Jake had attempted to help, but the older brother had died and the father had threatened Jake. Jake gave the mother a car and money, and he hopes that she got away. Jake says he needed to make sure his child wasn’t close to the city in case there was retribution.
Sadie arrives home to find that the garden has been destroyed. She again sees the spectral figure at the edge of the forest and is terrified.
Interlude 9 Summary
This interlude is a recipe for a healing salve Gigi notes she used on her children, then on Seth and Sadie, when they were injured as children.
Chapter 10 Summary
Worried that the effects of the knot of Isis seem to be waning, Sadie decides not to tell Gigi about the garden, but she does tell Seth about the garden and about what happened with Jake. Seth thinks it sounds out of character for Jake. Gigi falls in the house. While Seth suggests they go to the hospital, Gigi refuses. She sends the other family members out of the room, saying she needs to speak with Seth and Sadie.
Gigi tells Seth and Sadie that they need to sprinkle salt on the grounds where Julian is buried to keep his spirit at bay. She tells Seth that his attempts to avoid his magic by not using it won’t work, and he needs to let Sadie help him. Gigi tells them that they have until the first full moon after her death to address the life debt. She also tells them that their mother will eventually return and they should be cautious of her magic but give her a chance.
Anne and Sadie go to the market in town. Sadie sees Jake with Bethany, who she is distraught to realize is beautiful and nice. Remembering Gigi’s advice to remember who she is, she speaks to Jake and Bethany cordially.
Gigi’s health declines while the family stays close to her. Gigi dies.
Interlude 10 Summary
The interlude lists a recipe for harvest soap for luck. It is not preceded by Gigi’s first-person introduction.
Chapter 11 Summary
Sadie knows she has just experienced her third heartbreak. The family all mourn differently, and are unsure what to do next. Town inhabitants and Jake come to pay their respects. Sadie’s magic causes a daily, minor catastrophe.
Seth and Raquel try to convince Sadie to work in the garden. Despite her reluctance, she eventually does and is shocked that everything has been repaired or replanted. Jake arrives and reveals that he fixed the garden. Sadie finds that Aunt Anne has cooked Gigi’s fudge recipe and done it justice. Sadie reflects on the fact that Gigi made the dish when they opened the café. She finds a box of letters from Gigi to all the family members. Sadie’s letter tells her that as a last resort, she can nullify the curse and save Seth by sacrificing herself or by giving up who she is.
Interlude 11 Summary
The interlude contains the recipe for maple butterscotch walnut fudge Anne made in the previous chapter. The first-person introductory note from Gigi notes that she made it when she opened the café and that running the shop with Sadie has been a very special time for the two women.
Chapter 8-Interlude 11 Analysis
One of the most important techniques Randall uses throughout this section of the novel is brief, vivid characterization. Throughout the novel to this point, Randall has included descriptions of individuals who live in the town when they cross Sadie’s path. Even when minor characters are only mentioned once, Randall includes a very vivid and specific description of them. Such descriptions serve to characterize the town and the setting through its people. In this section of the novel, Randall employs the same technique for each Revelare aunt and uncle who arrives. The aunts and uncles are minor characters, whose role in the novel is primarily their collective involvement in grieving for their mother, Gigi. Randall thus provides a few minor but vivid characterizing details, rather than developing each of them as a significant secondary character.
The characterizing details about minor family members also serve the purpose of characterizing the Revelare family magic. The aunts and uncles are generally characterized through the type of magic they have. For example, Aunt Kay’s “magic lay in making everyone around her feel loved. A back scratch from her nails felt better than a ninety-minute massage because it was infused with focused intention and love. A compliment from Kay made you believe it instead of brushing it off or awkwardly accepting it, as women were wont to do” (144). As well as being brief and magic-focused, Randall’s descriptions of very minor characters center on how they affect those around them. For example, the inclusion of Sadie’s interiority in such characterizations means that they characterize her as well. This passage, while describing Aunt Kay, also reveals Sadie’s tendency to brush off compliments. Further, her focus on how Kay’s attentions make her feel is symptomatic of her tendency to avoid close love for fear of heartbreak.
This section of the novel also foreshadows the reveal that Jake is engaged. He attempts to talk to Sadie several times, but is always interrupted. The interrupted conversations create suspense around the mystery of what Jake needs to tell Sadie. When Jake does tell Sadie about the engagement, she is angry but partially blames herself for the delay, remembering the times he’d told her he wanted to talk about something and she’d avoided it “Because she’d known it was something she didn’t want to hear. And like a child covering their ears, she’d refused to listen” (170). Randall characterizes both Sadie and Jake through their interactions in this conversation, and creates a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to their reconciliation.
This section includes Gigi’s death from cancer and centers on Sadie and the other family members’ grief. Randall develops the theme of Familial Grief and Coping with Terminal Illness through descriptions of the grief that precedes Gigi’s death, the diversity of individuals’ reaction to her death, and the subtheme of food as magic. The family’s experience of hearing about Gigi’s illness, waiting for her death, and processing it after it occurs is all connected to food. Gigi tells the family about her illness during dinner, and Sadie thinks about how “You could cook all the magic in the world into the most delicious of dishes, but [...] nothing compared to the magic of sharing an ordinary meal with people you loved” (152). The family experiences a collective and premature grief before Gigi’s death, given her terminal diagnosis. Many of their interactions while talking about her death are related to descriptions of food. Randall therefore connects two of the novel’s major themes by associating food and familial grief.
