56 pages • 1-hour read
When the World Tips Over
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Character Analysis
Cassidy Snow-Fall
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. Cassidy hid these stories, which began “in the time of forever,” under her mattress. In time Cassidy begins writing her own “in the time of forever” stories. This confirms her role as one of the chief narrators.
Cassidy is a sensitive, tender-hearted person. She is loyal and forms deep attachments easily. When she was young, her mother, Marigold, was the center of Cassidy’s world, her true love and soulmate. But her mother’s behavior, likely due to an untreated mental health condition, caused her to be erratic in giving affection and frequently withdraw into depressive, catatonic-like episodes. Cassidy experiences intermittent parentification, feeling that she has to be the serious, responsible one and look after her mother. Starved for affection and nurturance, Cassidy finds consolation in the insects she keeps in jars. Later, she latches quickly onto Dave Caputo, longing for a second father.
Cassidy is also intelligent, grounded, and resourceful, which helps her protect and feed herself when Marigold is unable to do so. When her mother abandons her entirely, Cassidy is devastated; she feels that her world and her identity have shattered. She is shocked to learn that her father was not a surfer named Jimmy who died, as her mother told her. Instead, her father is a winemaker named Dexter Brown, though Cassidy later learns his history as Theo Fall. Though this secret hinders her ability to trust him, the reliable affection and secure, stable home he gives her helps Cassidy grow into a confident, self-possessed, mature young woman.
Cassidy’s character is full of imagination, humor, compassion, and affection. She is also intensely loyal. When she meets Wynton at age 13, he soothes her heartbreak over Dave Caputo’s betrayal, and Cassidy remains deeply drawn to the memory of this boy with the violin. Cassidy functions as the impetus that reunites the broken Fall family, and her reunion with Wynton at the end offers a happy conclusion to her love story, fulfilling her long-held dream of integration into a larger, loving family.
Miles Fall
Miles Fall is the second son of Bernadette Fall and has inherited many traits from his father, Theo. Like his siblings, Miles is named after one of Theo’s favorite trumpet players, Miles Davis. Dizzy describes Miles as “quiet, serious, and scary-beautiful” (12). Miles has a glow about him that Dizzy can perceive in darkness—a trait the reader will discover is inherited from his great-grandfather Alonso Fall—and animals are drawn to him. He communicates telepathically with the neighbor’s dog, a black Lab named Sandro. Miles is deeply reserved about emotion and reluctant to express himself other than in his poetry, a few pieces of which have been published. A sign of his deep repression is that Miles only cries in his sleep. When he confronts his father, he weeps while awake for the first time in many years, signaling that Miles is letting go of his reserve and becoming able to express himself.
Miles is studious and athletic. He attends a private Catholic boarding school on an athletic scholarship for track but increasingly feels out of place there. Miles is attracted to boys and was stunned to recently experience his first kiss with a line cook, Nico, who worked at his mother’s restaurant. In the beginning of the book, Miles fears that he is becoming a monster or that he is a performer in his own life. He detests the nickname Perfect Miles that Dizzy and Wynton have given him. He always conforms, always does what is expected, and increasingly fears that people will not accept his true self. Wynton’s dislike for Miles is an ongoing source of pain, as Miles looked up to Wynton when they were young. Miles’s breaking of Wynton’s bow is a sign that Miles himself has snapped. He fears that he is descending into depression—he calls it The Gloom Room—and his breaking point came when he awoke in the dumpster after spending an evening out with Wynton and his friends. Later, when he realizes that he ran his mother’s truck into the statue of Alonso Fall and Wynton took the blame, Miles begins to re-examine his relationship with his siblings and wonder if his deep reserve is one reason they have often excluded him.
Miles undergoes strong character growth as he feels brought back to life, first by meeting Cassidy, with whom he feels an inexplicable ease and connection that will later turn out to be a sibling bond. By the time he meets Felix, who is large, exuberant, and bursting with color, Miles is ready to open up emotionally. Admitting to Dizzy that he is gay is a turning point for Miles as he can finally be honest with his family and accept that they love him. Likewise, understanding how much of his hurt can be traced to his father’s abandonment sets Miles free to make his own choices about who he wants to be. His transformation is the most complete among all the characters, and his kiss with Felix confirms for Miles that it can be possible to live as he wishes.
Wynton Fall
Wynton is the eldest of the Fall brothers and, at least initially, the most reckless. Like his siblings, Wynton is named after one of Theo Fall’s favorite trumpet players, Wynton Marsalis. To Dizzy, Wynton is “so awesome he gave off sparks” (4). Miles thinks of him as “the guy full of voltage and fury, who blew the lids off jars, who walked into a room and electrocuted all present” (337). Cassidy describes him as having “pale skin, the full froggy lips, the freckles like a map of lonely stars, eyes the electric blue of a dragonfly wing” (264). Wynton feels things intensely but expresses himself chiefly through his violin, which he received from his father when he was six. When the present storyline opens, Wynton is in trouble with his mother; he stole money from her restaurant, took her engagement ring, crashed her truck, and knocked the head off the town’s statue of Alonso Fall. As punishment Bernadette kicked him out of the house, but Dizzy left out the keys so Wynton could sneak in. Wynton is extravagant, irresponsible, deeply sensitive, and also unmoored. He wants to be successful as a performer and hopes to join a band he admires, but his behavior is self-destructive in other ways, most evident when he lingers at night in the middle of a country road and gets hit by a car.
Wynton’s character arc is more subtle than some of the other young adults because for much of the book he lies in a coma and can only distantly hear people speaking to him. His growth is internal as he comes to terms with his knowledge about the history of the family, including that his mother had an affair with his Uncle Clive and that Wynton is Clive’s son. Wynton carries a deep guilt that he caused his father to leave the family by telling him about Clive and Bernadette while Theo was sick. That Wynton slept with Theo’s trumpet when he was a boy shows his devotion to Theo; that Theo leaves his trumpet with Wynton likewise shows Theo’s attachment to Wynton. Wynton adored Miles when they were young and took great pride in being important to Miles, but when he began to guess that he might not be Theo’s son, he began tormenting Miles. His devotion to Dizzy, and hers to him, proves that Wynton is both loving and lovable; the same is proven by Cassidy’s devotion. Though it’s not clear what will happen to Wynton when he wakes from the coma, or how much his injuries will limit his musical ability, his love for Cassidy fills him with optimism.
Dizzy Fall
Dizzy is the fourth young protagonist and point-of-view character. Like her brothers, she is named after one of Theo’s favorite trumpet players, bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy is 12 and has never met her father, as he left them when her mother was pregnant, but she is convinced she has seen him around their property. Dizzy feels things intensely, in part due to her adolescence, in part due to her keen intelligence and curiosity. She loves learning facts and enjoys cooking, traits she has inherited from her parents. She also experiences synesthesia, perceiving scents and tastes as colors. Dizzy has frizzy hair, freckles, and black Clark Kent glasses, and she describes herself as having “frog-in-a-wig looks” and “nuclear mushroom hair” (7). Her inner world, however, is spectacular. Wynton compares her to a geode—a rock that looks plain on the outside but has “a sparkling kingdom of glory within” (76). She is also described as sharing some aspects of Wynton’s electric personality; “Reading about these woo-woo things made Dizzy’s soul buzz and Dizzy wanted a buzzy soul. A buzzy everything” (3).
Dizzy is becoming interested in sexual feelings, in part due to her interest in her mother’s favorite romance novel, Live Forever Now. Her character arc in the novel begins with another betrayal and abandonment with what she thinks of as her divorce from her best friend, Lizard (who now goes by his real name, Tristan), after an unsuccessful experiment with kissing. Dizzy’s optimism and cheerful nature balance the other characters who descend into fear, gloom, or regret. She decides Cassidy must be an angel and is overjoyed at meeting her father. Dizzy’s most difficult lesson is learning that in real life, love sometimes does not go both ways. Her optimism is rewarded, however, when she is able to reconnect with her father and learns that Lizard likes her after all. The positive conclusion to Dizzy’s arc reflects the novel’s larger ending notes of joy, reconciliation, and romantic love.
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