No no no. Did not like at all. Maybe if I had read the first two in the series, the girls would have had more dimension to them. But I'm not going to go back. No character development, whiny characters, wasn't suspenseful, just no. I really don't see what my BT friends saw in it, even after reading their cogent reviews!

4 stars.

This was a 3 star read for the most part but I liked how it all rapped up in the end. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those books that sticks with me and is remembered over the years and thought of.

I was recommended this book by my dad when I was a little kid. Yes, I also did hear about it since I'm a fan of The Cure. This was a great read. It's not like what I usually read at that age. I loved it. Really want to read it again!

On Charlotte's first day at boarding school she feels out of place and unsure of who she really is, but when she wakes up the next morning in the same bed only 40 years in the past, she becomes even more unsure of her own identity. She spends most of the school year, then, switching places each night with Clare, a boarding school girl from the past, and it seems a fun adventure until Clare and her sister are sent to stay somewhere off the grounds, which strands Charlotte in the past and Clare in the future.
A fair-to-middling time travel book for Middle Graders, which is somewhat saved by the interesting plot twist at the end. I think it could have been a much more interesting story if we could also get Clare's point of view as well as Charlottes, perhaps in alternate chapters.

I loved this book! I can’t believe I never came across this book in high school when it first came out. Wonderful story, wonderful ending.

I came across this book while trying to find a boarding school book I’d read in the late 60s or early 70s. Didn’t find that one but am glad I found this one!

Well, I never imagined I would cry at the end of this book but I did though I did not like it much. I did like the langauge, very beautiful and poetic at times, but the story itself was quite strange and a bit disturbing. Maybe I will read it again sometime and see it differently, or maybe it is not the right book to read before Christmas, so I might give it another go

“Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less”
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Charlotte Sometimes is a 1969 children’s timeslip novel. It starts on Charlotte Makepeace’s very first day at boarding school. As the first one into her dormitory, she chooses the strange, wheeled bed next to the window with the brass bedstead. When she wakes the next morning however, she finds that she is no longer thought of as Charlotte, but as Clare Moby, and it’s no longer 1958, but it’s an austere and rather frightening 1918, just after the WW1 and before the Spanish Flu Pandemic


Just as Charlotte is in 1918, Clare is in 1958, and the two girls switch between the two periods in history on alternate days making it difficult for them to establish friendships and catch-up on their lessons. Meanwhile, Clare’s younger sister, Emily, is becoming increasingly suspicious that something is amiss


I read this as a stand-alone novel and it worked perfectly well, but there are apparently two earlier books in the “Avery Hall” series that introduce Charlotte and give some of her backstory. Like all good children’s books, the simplicity of the writing in Charlotte Sometimes belies the complex concepts that it discusses; the development of identity, the myriad of ways to deal with grief and the sense of being an outsider. If you’ve not heard of the book, you may have listened to The Cure song of the same name which I then hunted down once I’d finished…the lyrics really do capture the book so well

Yes, I picked this up because it inspired the Cure song.
Five stars because I would’ve loved it as a kid too.

*2.5⭐️

Charlotte Sometimes follows Charlotte, the new girl at boarding school. She feels even more lonely and confused when she wakes up there, but in another time, 1918, and called a different name, Clare. She seems to have swapped places with Clare. She and Charlotte must get back to their own time before they're stuck forever.

I was hoping I'd enjoy this more than I did. It was one of my mum's favourite books as a kid so I thought I'd give it a go.

I can't say that I read many time travel stories so I'm not sure if I even like them. However I thought those elements were okay. I found mostly the random bits of plot were my issue less so than the main story.

I'm not sure I completely bought the fact that Charlotte and Clare are children. They seemed to act pretty rationally considering the situation.

Perhaps this is just how children's books were written in 1969 but I found the writing to be very impersonal. I felt very removed from the characters.

I will say that I quite enjoyed some of the atmosphere. It was quite spooky.

All in all, I wouldn't say this is a bad book. I just found it fairly confusing considering it's a children's book, but perhaps that says more about me than the book.

I read about Charlotte Sometimes on the Chicklit message boards, and it sounded interesting; and then finding out that Robert Smith had liked it enough to write a song about it cinched the deal and I ordered myself a copy. The book tells the story of Charlotte, a new girl at a boarding school, who wakes up one morning to find a huge tree outside her bedroom window where the day before there had been none. And more disconcertingly, the girl in the bed next to her is calling her "Clare." Charlotte eventually surmises that she has changed places with a girl who attended the boarding school forty years before her, and each night she and Clare switch places again, so that one day she is in her own time and the next day she is in wartorn 1918.

Charlotte and Clare actually change places bodily; they look enough alike that nobody notices, although everyone wonders why each girl forgets so many things and is one day good at piano lessons, one day good at math, but never consistent in any subject. One of the themes the book explores is the idea that we see what we expect to see: nobody realizes what's happened because nobody expects anything so outlandish as Charlotte not being Charlotte every other day. Nobody looks close enough to notice. Even Charlotte realizes that she's never really looked at her hands or face closely enough to be sure whether she's still physically Charlotte or whether she's inhabiting another body that's just similar to her own.

It's an interesting idea, and well carried out.

Notes on a June 2004 re-read: I read the 1987 edition of Charlotte Sometimes, but I'd heard beforehand that the later editions (such as mine) had a different ending from the original one. I borrowed a 1969 edition from the library and did some side-by-side comparisons.

There are a number of minor changes throughout the books: a different word here, a change in punctuation there. Two short chapters in the original printing (chapters 14 and 15) are combined to make a single chapter in the later edition (Part 2 chapter 7) - and, obviously, they changed the manner in which the sections were numbered.

The only major difference that I spotted was, indeed, the final chapter. In the 1987 edition, the three-page final chapter finds Charlotte reflecting on all that had happened to her, followed by a frenzy in which she opens the hollow bedpost to find the shared diary, hoping for one last secret message from Clare. There is no secret message, just Charlotte's own final notes, yellowed with age.

In the 1969 edition, the six-page final chapter has Charlotte receive a package from Clare's sister Emily, now a middle-aged woman whose daughter attends school with Charlotte. It ends with Charlotte feeling distracted and out-of-place, living in her own time but with a head full of memories of a different era.

It seems like the later edition wants to reinforce that Charlotte is really back in the present, with her adventures now just a strange memory. The earlier edition suggests that Charlotte will never quite be fully in the present because she has this head full of memories of other people and places and events. Both endings work; I don't think either would be a disappointment to the reader; but I think the earlier edition is more philosophically and psychologically interesting. I'd encourage those of you who read one edition and enjoyed it to look up the other and see whether you like it more or less for ending in a different way.

This is a beautiful, inventive book that spawned one of my all-time favorite songs from high school, so it seems unusual that I did not read it before now. The plot is simple and easy-to-follow while also being complex and thoughtful. It would be easy for a younger reader to understand while offering older readers nuanced concepts to make you think for a while. The ending is bittersweet and lovely.

I read this book as child (probably 8 - 10 years old) and that was *coughalmostfortyyearscough* ago and all I remembered was that I totally loved it!
Then recently, by a twist of fate, I discovered it was available on Audible and I couldn't resist having a nostalgic re-read.
It's definitely interesting t0 revisit as an adult, it's a very English book (which I didn't remember) and its actually quite a sad too, set at the end of the war, there's soldiers dying, children losing their parents and children dying of the flu.
It's quite different to the types of books written for children today, but as an adult it captured my attention long enough and I was again surprised at the ending, which no doubt I was all those years ago, but had forgotten. It even brought a tear to my eye.
I felt like I experienced a little time travel of my own!

Hard to rate - my child self would definitely have given it 5 stars without hesitation, as an adult reader I'd give it a 3 - so I've gone for an average of the two :)