Due colpi in rapida successione, capitolo venti e seconda appendice, e tutta la tensione accumulata ti arriva addosso come un tir.

This was well worth going back to. I hardly remembered anything about it from when I read it as a child - and of course back then I probably didn’t appreciate how beautiful the descriptive writing is, never at the expense of pace and story.

An unusual book. It had an old-fashioned feel, like What Katy Did or the All-of-a-Kind Family, but was about a girl who time travels when she sleeps in a certain bed at boarding school. I remember liking it a great deal, at the time, but now can't remember what year it took place and what era she traveled to. WWII?

I first came across this book as an adult and being a fan of school stories I thought it would be similar to others of the genre. So it was a surprise - a pleasant one - to find out it was about much more than the usual fun on the playing fields and in the dorm kind of thing. The time-travel is central to the plot, of course, but it's the characters of the main players that are the important thing, IMO.

There's a certain eeriness to this book, not surprising given its subject matter,but for those of us who enjoy the unusual it's certainly an interesting read. There's sadness in it too, again not surprising as a lot of the action takes place during the First World War. The ending is happy - or as near happy as is possible in the circumstances. By the time I got to the end I really cared about the characters, even though the book is written in a rather low-key kind of way with no real attempt made to make the characters particularly endearing. Yet it's the girls and their ways of coping with the unexpected and the difficult that make the book so interesting and absorbing and the ending rather touching.

I will fully admit that I didn't discover this book in the traditional way.
I have to admit to being a HUGE fan of the Cure. Yup. That's 80's quasi-gothy band, lead by Robert Smith. What can I say, I've always liked boys in makeup.

One of my favorite songs by the Cure was always Charlotte Sometimes. I didn't have a clue that the song title was taken from a book, and that lines from the book were used in the song, as well as in the song The Empty World (She talked about the armies, that marched inside her head).

I had just graduated from high school, and was working at a Girl Scout summer camp in Vermont. They had a large building with a stage that had the back wall covered in bookshelves. It was a rainy day so the councilors were letting the kids run amok in the building. Me, being bored to tears by the rain and driven crazy by the kids running amok decided to check out the bookshelves.

The title Charlotte Sometimes caught my eye and grabbed the book to read in my tent later.

Once I read the book, and fell in love with it, I had to get my own copy so I could share it with all of my Cure loving friends.

It's still one of my favorite books, and it still puts me in the mood to listen to the Cure.

This is a beautiful book, almost dreamlike at times, as Charlotte moves quietly between two very different worlds. We get deep inside her head, as she ponders and worries about identity and what it is that makes you uniquely yourself. But we also experience the world and people around her; in both 1918 as WW1 rages and she lives the life of Clare Mobely; and in her own life over forty years later, in the same place but in a very different era.

I think, of all the books I've ever read, this has one of my favourite endings. It is sad and unexpected but also deeply satisfying, as Charlotte's two lives briefly and poignantly overlap.

Since I'd seen it labeled as such, I thought this book was just an ordinary boarding school story. But it soon became evident to me that I had never read the full description (or a full review) of Charlotte Sometimes... and what a surprise I got! Charlotte's confusion and shock in Chapter 2 mirrored my own; I found it was rather delicious to not know that plot twist was coming, so I could wonder along with Charlotte. I wouldn't say not knowing was integral to my enjoyment of the story, but it was rather fun. Plus, the historical setting was excellently drawn, as well as the characters. Altogether, a most satisfying and pleasing read!

A beautiful story that is well written, Charlotte Sometimes tells the story of Charlotte Makepeace after she swaps bodies with Clare, a girl from 40 years ago. The story gives some insight into what life was like for children during the first world war. It is an easy read with well developed characters, although there is no real explanation as to why the body swapping happens. It is such a cute read that you don't really mind that however. Would recommend.

This book definitely didn't have the magic that The Summer Birds had - perhaps because I didn't read it as a child - but it was still an interesting plot. I kept waiting for the questions I had about the why and how of the time travel to be explained, but it never was. I wanted the ending to be much more conclusive and explanatory than it ended up being, and it was a huge disappointment to turn the last page and still have so many unanswered questions. There were also several chapters that dealt with secondary characters that I kept expecting to have some sort of meaning on the whole story (and maybe even tie into The Summer Birds as well), but nothing happened with them at all. It was almost like those chapters had been written in after the fact simply to add length to the book, because they really didn't add much depth. Overall though, it was a decent YA book.

A wonderful and unusual time travel story. Another one that I missed as a child and was glad to find as an adult.

2.5 stars.

Well. I was told I would like this book if I liked When Marnie Was There, but alas. Charlotte Sometimes just wasn’t my slice of pie.

I understand that it’s part of a trilogy, but I was told that it is a great stand-alone, and that the other two books are hard to find. So I’m rating this from stand-alone perspective.

I will give it this—I was thoroughly interested in what was going on with Charlotte and Clare. Why’d they keep switching eras, how were they gonna get back to their own in the end?

But I just don’t think this book lived up to the hype that I had heard. Maybe younger audiences would enjoy it a little more, but I honestly don’t know.

Firstly, the characters. While I wanted to know what was going on, I wasn’t really connecting with the characters. Because Charlotte was in Clare’s time for most of the book, I feel like I never really got to *know* Charlotte. I couldn’t tell if the personality we saw was hers, or it was her trying to make a convincing Clare. As for Clare…I didn’t know her either. There were a few brief diary entries by her, and Emily’s comments on how Clare would react to things, but she was never actually present in the book. Yes, I understand the book is from the point of view, although 3rd person, of Charlotte, but… I would have liked to get a little further into their differences and similarities.

Emily… She had her moments of okay, but generally I found her a little annoying. I understand she was a tomboy, she was headstrong. Almost to the point of rebellious, I think. She was more-or-less a pest for many moments in the book.

As for the rest of the cast… I couldn’t connect with anyone in Charlotte’s time because we were hardly there. At the end, Elizabeth befriends Charlotte because Clare told her what was going on, but I would have liked to have seen that! I can’t connect with Elizabeth when she’s just suddenly friendly. I couldn’t even really remember who she was when Charlotte finally got back to her time. I did like Agnes Chisel-Brown, and I liked Bunty. They seemed like more fleshed out characters, with real struggles. Everyone else was like extras in a movie.

The plot. W-was there one? There was a story, but not exactly a plot, it felt like? The climax and resolution fell flat. It was rushed, abrupt. All throughout the plot, too, things were hinted at, but either never fully explained, or hinted at and ended up being the case, which made for no “big reveal”, which is one thing I enjoyed SO much about When Marnie Was There, as well as Tom’s Midnight Garden. Because of that, there was no poignancy to Charlotte and Emily’s relationship, or to Charlotte’s arrival back in her own time. I would have loved to have seen Charlotte meet grown-up Emily. Have a scene like the scene in When Marnie Was There where Gillie is telling Anna and the Lindsays about The Marsh House. Or the final scene between Tom and Hattie in Tom’s Midnight Garden. At the end we learn that Clare would have died… But even that, while it had a tiny bit more poignancy than the rest of the resolution, it was just another detail explained to us. Because we never did get to really connect with Clare, that didn’t have as much meaning as it could have had. That, and I think that the author used the wrong character to explain what happened to Clare. Sarah hadn’t a clue what had happened to Clare and Charlotte, or even knew Clare at all… Like I said, there should have been a scene between Charlotte and grown-up Emily.

Another aspect I loved about When Marnie Was There and Tom’s Midnight was how the setting was used. The Marsh House and the garden are both characters in and of themselves. With this whole thing about the bed with wheels being the mode of time-switching for Clare and Charlotte, I’d have liked it to have character. Not just it being a bed that everyone would have preferred because of the cool wheels, and that you could hide things in. Use some prose or something that gives the bed life, makes the reader truly curious about what it is, other than Emily speculating that it was the bed that caused the time travel, and all the girls finding it cool that it had wheels. I mean, why did this bed have wheels, and none of the others did? Where’d it come from? Why didn’t anyone care to ask about the wheels, or how you could hide things in it, or whatever? Charlotte and Clare slept in the same bed for a bit… Okay, but that doesn’t explain anything. Other people had slept in it too, and still it was just Clare and Charlotte that switched. I would have liked to have had more of a curiosity around that bed, and how it could do that.

Also, back to characters again, I guess, the Chisel-Browns should have had a little more meaning to the resolution, in my opinion. Agnes was so sweet, one of the only characters I was able to actually connect with, and once they went back to school, she was an afterthought. And the whole thing with people dying in the war, maybe that could have been a more explored theme? There was that whole seance scene… I found that really weird. Seances are very dark, bad, witchcrafty things that result in terror and demonic stuff in real life. It could have been done without.

So there you have it, folks. My thoughts. I’d have given it two stars, but I was able to finish it, and also I liked the characters of Agnes and Bunty enough to bump it up by half a star. Anyway, thinking about what I loved most about When Marnie Was There and Tom’s Midnight Garden, my biggest qualm is definitely the ending. I think the ending, where Charlotte could have met Emily years later and explain what happened, was a missed opportunity. And again, the lack of character with the bed with wheels. All of that would have made the book magical, and more meaningful. It would have had, perhaps, near the same bittersweetness as those other two lovely books that I mentioned had. But there were so many things that went unexplained or underwhelming, and so I just could not connect with Charlotte Sometimes.

I’ve recently read “Charlotte Sometimes” if for no other reason than to compare The Cure lyrics of their classic song Charlotte Sometimes to parts of the children’s fantasy. This is what I learned and it’s very interesting. ***Spoiler Alter***

All the faces, All the voices blur
Change to one face, Change to one voice

First sentence: By bedtime all the faces, the voices, had blurred for Charlotte to one face, one voice.

Prepare yourself for bed

Second sentence: She prepared herself for bed . . . .

The light seems bright, And glares on white walls

Book 2nd paragraph, 6th sentence: The light seemed to bright for them, glaring on white walls . . . .

All the sounds of

Book 4th paragraph, 4th sentence: All the sounds about her . . . .

Charlotte sometimes
Into the night with
Charlotte sometimes

Book 5th paragraph, 1st sentence: She must have slept at last . . . .

Night after night she lay alone in bed
Her eyes so open to the dark

Part II, chapter 4, 1st sentence: Night after night, Charlotte lay in bed with her eyes open to the dark . . . .

The streets all looked so strange
They seemed so far away
But Charlotte did not cry

Part II, chapter 4, paragraph 15, 1st sentence: The streets looked strange . . . .

The people seemed so close
Playing expressionless games

Part II, chapter 2, paragraph 24, 3rd sentence: Charlotte, on the other hand, became absorbed, concentrating wholly on her fingers’ easing . . . .

The people seemed so close
So many other names

Part II, chapter 2, paragraph 37: “Good night, Mr. Chisel Brown,” she said with almost a curtsy. “Good night, Mrs. Chisel Brown. Good night, Miss Agnes Chisel Brown. Good night, cat. Good night, dog . . ..”

When all the other people dance - Reference to school dance

Expressionless the trance - Reference to séance

So many different names - Reference to names of Brown family

The sounds all stay the same - Reference to airplane sounds overhead

On a different world - Past where Charlotte travels

On that bleak track
(See the sun is gone again)
The tears were pouring down her face
She was crying and crying for a girl
Who died so many years before

Part III, chapter 2, paragraph 53, 1st sentence: On that bleak track, the sun almost gone again, tears were pouring down her face. She was crying and crying for a girl for a girl who had died more than 40 years before.

Charlotte sometimes crying for herself

Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 13, last sentence: She began crying bitterly, could not stop . . . .

Charlotte sometimes dreams a wall around herself

Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 10, 1st sentence: She dreamed she stood below the picture, The Mark of the Beast, and there were soldiers all around her in red uniforms, stiff as toys but tall as men. There were dolls, too, like Miss Agnes’s doll, as tall as the soldiers . . .

Glass sealed and pretty

Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 15, 4th sentence: And when she looked at the wall at the picture glass, it looked quite empty, as if a mirror hung there, not a picture at all.


Two other songs by The Cure, Splintered in Her Head and The Empty World, are based on “Charlotte Sometimes.” You can check out my analysis of those lyrics on my blog: www.AndrewBarger.blogspot.com. Thanks!