Operation Cassandra
By Elizabeth Alice Honig
83,000 words
On the morning of her first day of 9th grade, Cass Tepper wakes up to discover that she is now Cassie Follett, a girl living in London in 1938. She has no idea what has happened to her, and struggles to function in her new persona while trying to figure out a way to get home to modern San Francisco. Her large, energetic new family is overwhelming; and at school, she discovers that Cassie’s best friend Isa St. John is a terrible anti-Semite. She gets caught up in Isa’s plans to exclude Ruth Morganstern, a Jewish girl whom Cassie likes, from the netball team.
One day after netball practice, she overhears the glamorous, charismatic star of the senior team use the word 'cool,’¯ and realizes that this girl’“red-headed 'Ginger’¯ Cazalet’“must be a time traveler like herself. Cassie and Ginger, who are both really named Cassandra, think that they have been sent back to 1938 for a purpose’“but what? They know the future, but since they are just children, nobody will believe them.
Cassie becomes friendly, in a somewhat wary way, with Ginger; but she hits it off much better with Ginger’s younger brother Philip, who has a printing press and publishes his school newspaper. The two girls search through birth announcements and run a personal ad seeking more Cassandras. They are answered by Cassandra Mary Annesley-Talbot, who has landed in a loathsome aristocratic family and begs Cassie to rescue her. A fourth Cassandra ('Bibi’¯) loves life with her quiet, doting 1938 family and has no desire to return to modern America. On the other hand Sanda Pell, now at a 'god-forsaken girls’ boarding school with no effective means of heating,’¯ longs for her former life in London.
Cassie asks Ginger to organize a Girl Guide patrol of Cassandras, hoping that if they find a way to intervene in the past together, they will return home. Ginger, though, wants to quit the Guides altogether because of a personal conflict with the Captain, Miss Herrin. Cassie is afraid that Ginger is getting too involved with 1938 life and won’t help get the Cassandras home again, and the two have a huge row.
The new Guide patrol is formed but Ginger is frosty to Cassie. Cassie and Philip quarrel because she will not explain why all his sister’s friends are now named Cassandra. Having effectively lost her two best friends, Cassie turns for help to the supremely self-confident Mary, who is now at school and in Guides with her. They, along with Bibi, resolve to save Jewish children from Germany via the Kindertransport, hoping that this will be enough for them to get home to modern life. Mary writes a play about the coming Holocaust, loosely based on Anne Frank’s diary, for the Guides to stage as a benefit performance. They also search for sponsor families for five specific children from Hamburg who need to be rescued.
To Cassie’s horror, Isa catches the three Cassandras discussing their play, accuses them of being a Jewish conspiracy, and threatens to spill the beans. Aristocratic Mary, appealing to Isa’s snobism and egotism, convinces her instead to be the star of 'Words in the Darkness,’¯ playing a gentile girl who tries to save her Jewish best friend from the Nazis. Mary forces Ginger to agree to tell the other Guides, and Philip, about the Cassandras’ compounding and the future; Cassie, also against Ginger’s wishes, gets Miss Herrin to help them direct the production. The play receives a standing ovation and brings in over a hundred pounds. Lord Rothschild, a colleague of Sanda Pell’s MP father, pledges several hundred more. With what they have raised, and with the sponsors they have found, they will save almost a dozen Jewish children.

Epilogue
In June 1939, the five Cassandras meet the Kindertransport train bringing 'their’¯ children from Germany to England. After they watch the children meet their foster families, they admit to themselves that they probably aren’t going back to their old lives. Cassie goes home and packs away the original Cassie’s old toys, wondering where that girl is now, and recognizing that she is no longer the Cass Tepper she once was either.

**This is the first book in a 3-part series. The sequel, Chercote’s Hoard, is set in 1939-40 at an Elizabethan country house to which the school has been evacuated. The Cassandras foil a fascist plot to steal the British crown jewels, hidden in a tunnel under the gardens.
Each book in the series covers a school year, and follows the girls as they come of age in this very alien historical period, trying to function by the social standards of the past but bearing the expectations and attitudes of the future. In each book, they intervene differently in the past: in the first book it was a historical possibility, in the second, an event that would not have occurred had they not been there, and in the third, counter-factual history and the possibility of multiple histories.