55 pages • 1 hour read
Amy LeaWoke Up Like This
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.
Background
Genre Context: Romance
Woke Up Like This possesses the two most common elements of the romance genre: “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending” (“About the Romance Genre.” Romance Writers of America). First, the development of love between the protagonist and her long-time rival, Charlotte Wu and J. T. Renner, respectively, comprises the main plot and provides the central conflict. Their happy ending, though tentative because they cannot know for certain that their time-traveling experience of the future will actually take place, is optimistic in tone because Char learns how to live in the present, and this guarantees her much more happiness than worrying about the future or resenting the past.
That Char and J. T. begin the novel as rivals is another trope of the genre. The story takes place near the end of their senior year of high school, and their rivalry began several years before when J. T. stood Char up for a dance. Like Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Char feels slighted by J. T., and her pride prevents her from seeing who he really is or that he has romantic feelings for her. Also like Elizabeth, Char is an intelligent and stubborn female character. Char and J. T. fall in love in the future and then must learn, upon returning to their contentious present, how to navigate their old rivalry with changed feelings, and this provides the “challeng[e] [to] the relationship that needs to be overcome” (“Writing 101: What Is a Romance Novel?” MasterClass, 2 Sept. 2022). Char also has external goals—in fact, she has kept one high school bucket list since she was 13—and though J. T. initially thwarts her achievement of those goals, she realizes that having fun and being present are more important than accomplishing what she planned. Like Austen’s Mr. Darcy, J. T. teaches Char something important about herself, and she must be willing to admit her mistakes before their relationship can progress.
The element of time travel incorporates magical realism into the romance genre. Authors write at the intersection of these genres to portray the otherworldly powers of love to turn the real and mundane into the extraordinary. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), for instance, the protagonist has visions of her dead husband, and in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), the male love interest travels through time unpredictably, which periodically severs him from the protagonist. Char and J. T. also travel in time to witness the development of their relationship. The mystical quality of their time travel—happening after J. T. and Char are shocked by a metal time capsule—is never explained, as is typical of magical realism, though J. T.’s uncle who studies time travel presents some theories in Chapter 19.
Scientific Context: Brain Development in Adolescence
The brain’s frontal lobe, including the prefrontal cortex—which is responsible for “planning and problem solving”—is not considered to be fully developed until age 25 (“When Does the Brain Reach Maturity? It’s Later Than You Think.” Journey to College). Adolescents lack the ability to make consistently good decisions based on reason because their brains are still growing, and this leads them to make decisions based on something else, like emotion, instead. Lea explores this in Woke Up Like This as the characters in the novel make emotional decisions at 17 and learn to reason at 30. Because of her injured pride, 14-year-old Char develops a massive grudge against J. T. without giving him the opportunity to defend himself, while J. T. maintains a strategy of annoying Char to attract her attention. Meanwhile, Kassie maintains the lie that she rejected J. T., a lie that protects her pride.
Further, the ability to empathize with, predict, and understand the perspective of another person pertain to parts of the brain that undergo “substantial structural and functional change during this period” of adolescence (Hollarek, Miriam, and Nikki C. Lee. “Current Understanding of Developmental Changes in Adolescent Perspective Taking.” Current Opinions in Psychology, vol. 45, June 2022). In Woke Up Like This, 17-year-old Char and J. T. have an especially difficult time reading and interpreting each other’s feelings accurately, leading to wounded pride, upset, and confusion. Social demands become even more complex as individuals enter adolescence, producing a heightened demand for these kinds of skills. Char struggles to develop the social skills to read others and make reasonable choices regarding peers throughout the novel as they must interact to plan events such as the prom.
Lea juxtaposes the teenage and adult mentality as J. T. and Char both have a much easier time interpreting the other’s feelings—even predicting them—when they find themselves in 30-year-old bodies. Char is immediately aware of their physical maturation—she notes, with shock, her breast size and J. T.’s musculature—but her thought processes and behavior, along with J. T.’s, portray their brains’ maturity as well. They are less reactive and express their thinking to one another in a way that they could not as teens. Although they struggle to retain these abilities when they return to their 17-year-old selves, their memories provide a crucial aid, allowing them to overcome the challenges that once impeded their emotional connection.
