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.
Chapters 16-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Florence suggests they try a ritual in which each twin gives half of themselves via a totem. Her hope is their two halves will function as a whole person and satisfy the life debt. Florence attempts the spell, but it doesn’t work. Sadie begins to panic, and the garden begins to burn. She realizes that it has not been a malevolent spirit, but her own magic and emotions destroying the garden. She decides to stop letting her fear control her. Florence lights a cigarette, and Sadie notices it’s the same kind she saw the white-suited spirit holding. Sadie attempts to hurt Florence by telling her mother there may have been a reason she shouldn’t have had children.
Interlude 16 Summary
The interlude is a recipe for Gigi’s chocolate pecan pie, a signature recipe that is referenced several times throughout the novel.
Chapter 17 Summary
Gigi’s letter to Sadie begins appearing in odd places around the house. She rereads it and realizes Gigi didn’t mean that Sadie needed to sacrifice her life, but that she needed to sacrifice her magic. She decides there are a few things she needs to go before she gives it up. She bakes a pecan pie with coltsfoot (which causes justice) to give to Bethany and Jake in the hope that he’ll realize her pregnancy is a lie. She makes hyacinth bean soup, which signifies regret, as an apology to Florence. At dinner, she tells Seth and Florence what she has realized about the need to sacrifice her magic to save Seth. She tells them they should do the ritual on the night of the Fall Festival at Old Bailer, the site of Julian’s burial.
Interlude 17 Summary
The interlude is a recipe for the hyacinth bean soup Sadie makes in the previous chapter, which should be made if “you’re looking for forgiveness” (298).
Chapter 18 Summary
Sadie prepares for the Fall Festival and the ritual to give up her magic. She sees Gigi’s wedding photo and realizes the spirit she keeps seeing is her grandfather, who refused to move on without Gigi.
The night of the festival arrives. At the festival, Jake tells Sadie that Bethany faked the pregnancy and they’ve broken up. She tells him about her magic and her curse. He tells her he is in love with her, and they kiss.
Interlude 18 Summary
The interlude is Gigi’s recipe for orange infused honey, which brings “joy back into the lives of those who eat it” (309).
Chapter 19 Summary
The entire family goes to Old Bailer for the ritual. Sadie channels all her magic into Seth, and feels his magic as an unbearable cacophony of voices. She draws on her family for strength and pushes it back into him. Her magic drains and the ritual works. Seth wakes up and feels Sadie’s magic, but his own darkness is gone. They return home, and Jake is waiting for Sadie. He promises to stay, and they decide to share the dog.
Later that night, Florence hasn’t returned but sends a letter via Anne. In it, Florence promises that she will be back, but says she is going to try to find a way to restore Sadie’s magic.
Chapters 16-19 Analysis
Sadie’s character trajectory is central to this section of the novel. After realizing that the sacrifice she needs to make is her magic rather than her life, she begins to evaluate what it means to her and who she is without it. Sadie also realizes that the garden has been damaged not by a malevolent spirit but by her own magic: “Every burned bush was a testament to her fear and grief. It reflected what was inside her, she realized. The chaos and doubt” (287). This prompts her understanding that, in order to save her brother, she needs to control her fear and let go of her reliance on magic as the core of her identity. Randall also emphasizes the difference between courage and the absence of fear in Sadie’s mental preparation for the ritual in which she transfers her magic to him: “And Sadie knew, in that moment, that being afraid didn’t make someone weak or a coward. Doing something in spite of heartbreak and fear, that’s where courage came in” (308). That Sadie thinks about heartbreak in this passage emphasizes her progress toward understanding that trying to prevent heartbreak has been detrimental to her life.
Randall also emphasizes the effect of time in this section of the novel. Sadie begins to experience intense anxiety leading up to the ritual, and Randall emphasizes descriptions of the grandfather clock as a motif to represent the quick passage of time. Like the opening of the novel, the description of the household objects’ anthropomorphized movements is purposefully ambiguous. As time passes, “The house was practically humming [. . .] Windowpanes rattled. The grandfather clock’s pendulum swung in double time” (300). Because of Randall’s prevalent use of figurative language alongside the novel’s magical elements, this detail is ambiguous: The house’s seemingly magical reaction to the situation also functions as a metaphor for how time seems to speed up before a stressful event.
During the ritual, Randall includes a significant description of Seth’s magic and employs a musical metaphor for his suffering:
And then she heard the voices. They were coming from Seth. It was a cacophony. A symphony. She opened her eyes and his face was a mask of pain. The magic was pushing him through his own personal hell. His face was twisted in agony, eyes shut tight, and even in the dark, she could see his skin had turned a ghoulish white (312).
The passage is significant as a turning point in Seth and Sadie’s relationship. She has always had trouble understanding Seth’s internal struggles. For most of their lives, she didn’t know what his magic was, but even after he tells her, she has a difficult time empathizing with his painful experience because her own experience of magic is so unambiguously pleasant. Randall’s use of the musical metaphor indicates that Sadie’s experience of Seth’s magic is immersive and all-encompassing. This scene is also a climactic point at the novel, so the focus on Seth and Sadie’s relationship also emphasizes the importance of themes related to family and Second Chances: By transferring her magic to Seth, Sadie cements the bond between them that was almost severed when Seth left the town years earlier. In sacrificing her magic for him, she shows that she has learned the lesson Gigi tried to teach her at the beginning of the novel: that sometimes love is more important than magic.
