Being in a new boarding school is tough enough as it is, but to wake up and find you are in another year (1918 - 40 years in the past), with a brand new name, is confusing and very scary. How can this happen and how do you get back to your present time?

That is precisely what happens to Charlotte Makepeace. She goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next morning as Clare Mobley. She has somehow time- travelled back in time 40 years. Luckily she meets an older girl who has a message for her from the girl's mother. Her mother says if a girl named Charlotte ever arrives at the school to please treat her with kindness. The reader then tries to figure out who Charlotte has met in her past that could be this girl's mother.

She and Clare in the following months exchange places frequently and live temporarily in each other's worlds. Both struggle to fit in and hope they are not discovered to be the wrong girl for that era. Although they physically never meet they correspond to each other through a journal and hiding notes in the hollow bedposts. The girls learn a lot about each other and give each other helpful information enabling them to cope much better with their unfamiliar lives.

Charlotte assimilates into the past and seemingly is accepted as Clare Mobley. Gradually she feels her real self slipping away and she struggles to hold onto her own persona. Will she be trapped in this time-warp forever? Will she ever know normalcy once again? Can she find a way to make that happen?

This haunting and enthralling tale sucks you right into the story. You are trying to solve the mysteries that the skilled author sets before you. I really enjoyed the eeriness of it all and just kept on reading to find out if Charlotte could indeed get back to her own reality. I know this unique book will be a great read for ages 9-12 year olds. Adults will love it too I am sure. I highly recommend this book.

this book was different to the books i usually read and i quite enjoyed it.

i thought the concept of time travel in this book was very interesting and unique it did get a little baffling near the end when the book tried to explain why the girls had switched places.

i thoroughly enjoyed reading from charlottes perspective when she was in 1918. it definitely educated me more on what life was like during war and i liked reading a book that was set in a different time period. i felt as if i lived vicariously through charlotte in 1918 and that i was learning, exploring and i was being apart of a new era with her.

i wish we got a pov from clare who was 40 years in the future to see how she felt abt the new world without war and how the world overall developed since her time wether is got better or worse.

the ending was quite unexpected and sad but it also made it confusing as to how the girls where even able to switch in the first place considering what happened to clare.

lastly emily (clare’s sister) was so adorable when she was younger i absolutely loved her.

Like I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of time slip books, and this is a classic of the genre so I thought I’d better pick it up. It’s about a girl called Charlotte, who goes to bed after a difficult first day at boarding school, and wakes up in 1918, 30 or 40 years before her own time period. I really liked the boarding school setting, and I loved the gentle feel of the book, as well as the subtle humour. The notes Clare and Charlotte swap were great, and although I kind of wish we’d got to see Clare’s perspective in a dual narrative, I loved getting to know the characters in both time periods. I also loved the role that Sarah plays in the book, and although the ending was very sad in places (and I really wasn’t expecting it!), I really liked it. I’m very much hoping I can track down the two others in the series, because this was such a great read.

A childhood favourite that I reread. Still loved it although it doesn't quite have the wow factor that I experienced when reading it as a child.

This is a low fantasy time-travel novel published in 1969. The story is simply told in a clear prose style. It is about a girl in a boarding school in the late 1950s who sleeps in a bed and wakes up as someone else in 1918 - the girls change places from day to day until the girl from the 50s gets stuck in 1918 when that girl is removed from the school. The rest of the narrative deals with her adjustment to living in 1918 and her attempts to get back. It's really a lovely tale, well told. I was immediately taken with Charlotte and the other characters. I believed them as characters and felt that the dynamics of their relationships rang true. There is a séance and the armistice and suspense and fantasy. Low fantasy narratives are a passion - extraordinary things happening to everyday people - "The Twelve And The Genii" by Pauline Clarke was a recent favorite, "The Children of Green Knowe" by L.M. Boston, "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt are also highly recommended.

What an extraordinary book. Tom’s Midnight Garden is rightly loved as a time slip novel, but it’s poetic and lyrical and wistful in many ways. Farmer doesn’t so much avoid this as wilfully and determinedly invert it - it’s about the messiness and awkwardness and sadness of being adrift in time. For my money it’s one of the best books I have ever read about trauma and particularly the little discussed but very real world of childhood trauma

Charlotte is suddenly thrust into an alien and uncaring boarding school and then starts her time slip episodes. The book refuses to have nostalgia about the past, but instead highlights the horrors of a world just about coping with the trauma of a multitude of deaths of loved ones and then suddenly having a flu epidemic on top of it.

So much of the book is about the messiness of human emotions: Charlotte is paired with Clare’s younger sister who regularly begrudges the loss of her actual sister. The school is hard for them to cope with. The home they get sent to in the village has this whole sense of a family struggling with the PTSD of losing their son in the war (and again a son who openly talks about shell shock). The armistice is not a celebratory moment but an even more traumatic sequence where these confused children literally get caught in the eddies of adult behaviour they just cannot even begin to comprehend. And it doesn’t even get better once the resolution happens and Charlotte and Clare are returned to their actual time

What’s so amazing about it is that it feels like a book that doesn’t lie to children. It’s a novel that says, yeah it’s a rough time being a kid and there’s so much pain and horror that you will face and not be able to process easily. But it also says that this is normal and this is natural and that there are those who love and care for those who are lost. By openly and actively talking about loss and bullying and confusion and loneliness and childhood guilt, the book does a huge service to children everywhere. It’s refreshing in how it just refuses to avoid the messiness of life.

It’s a bold and beautiful and brave book. As well as reminding me of The Victorian Chaise Longue by Marghanita Laski, in the way it tells a very female story of powerlessness in the time slip stuff, it also very much reminds me of Kes: another beautiful book and film but one that knows and respects children enough to make them face brutality and horror as well as beauty and love. It’s a blooming masterpiece

This is an old favorite, one which I read as a child and rediscovered as an adult. It's a time travel fantasy, in which two girls at the same boarding school, one in 1918 and one in the present day (which was 1960 something---it's an old book) switch places. From a science fictional perspective, the book is flawed, not answering questions about how or why the transfer takes place. That simply isn't the point. However, by exploring the outcomes of their switching places---the bizarre relationship between the two girls who never really meet, and the (hinted at) dangers of learning/knowing too much about the future when you may soon return to the past---Farmer created a novel that is haunting and poignant, blending fantasy with the very real concern of finding one's place in the world.

It's been a busy month, and I haven't gotten to do all the reading I would've liked. This weekend, I took a break from the grown-up world with a trip to Nacogdoches and this sweet young adult book from 1969, Charlotte Sometimes.

Charlotte is the kind of resourceful, realistic heroine I would've loved as a twelve-year-old--heck, I loved her as a 30-year-old. Being on the beach,under a giant umbrella, knocking back whiskey and Coke made it even easier to get into the story of two little girls who inhabit a boarding school at different times in history. Sleeping in a certain bed makes them switch times and places (and bodies, I guess, but that's not really addressed.) Sure, it's about time travel, but it's also about the nature of identity, and about being plucky and brave, even when you don't want to (they could've used some of my whiskey for that, I bet), and about how important it is to know who you are, no matter where you are in your life (or in history.)

There's something so wonderful about books for girls from this era--their evocative illustrations, their at-the-time new way of presenting capable, well-rounded heroines, their plotlines miraculously free of lip gloss and IUDs (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, GOSSIP GIRL.) Just a great book, and one I'd be glad to hand off to any little girl who happened across my path--or, if the opportunity presents itself, to time-travel back and pass it to Little Julai.

Would have loved this as a kid, 20 year old me was crying on the tube !

I wish I had read this book when I was a child but actually, strangely I did not know of its existence until I saw a 40th Anniversary edition in Waterstones and was drawn by its interesting title and the fact that I am often drawn to books written by an author with the first name of Penelope; this is because it is my middle name and I am aware that it is unusual and for this reason I like it.

It is a fascinating and original story of a girl named Charlotte who, on starting a new boarding school wakes up the next day in the same bed but in 1918. She has changed places with a girl named Clare (my first name and spelt like me! This is always exciting for me!) and it is war time and she now has a little sister named Emily. The following day she wakes up back in her own time and thus begins the daily pattern. The real Clare is also being transported in Charlotte's place and so they come up with a way of communicating via a secret notebook so they can keep track of what is happening while they are gone.

We follow Charlotte through this story, we never actually meet Clare. It is written in the third person but it is not omniscient and so we only ever know as much as Charlotte which is interesting and certainly keeps the mystery going. After a while of switching daily, the two girls discover that Clare and Emily are to be moved to stay with a family. They are hopeful that this will put an end to this routine which is becoming a frustrating way to live, as they are sure that the bed in which they are both sleeping in their different times must be the cause. However, the days get delayed and Charlotte winds up being in 1918 when the girls are moved. This poses the problem of how to get the girls back to their right time and further mysterious and surprising developments begin to occur as the book unfolds itself and reveals its outcome.

This is the second book in a trilogy featuring these characters but I did not feel at all as though I ought to have read the other first although now I would be interested to. It is a wonderfully written story with all the right ingredients of mystery and intrigue and strangeness to make a popular children's book. Charlotte can get a little annoying at times, she tends to be a little wet but seems a bit more fun than what we hear of Clare. Emily is quite annoying but quite a convincing little sister figure. The second half of the book is the better half and twists itself up well into being truly original. Actually, Robert Smith of The Cure wrote a song based on this book, titled of the same name and once you get towards the end you can see how he was inspired. Here is the video, which is dreadful, but I quite like the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KeII3...
Apparently Penelope Farmer met him for the first time not so long ago, here is her account of it... http://grannyp.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06...


http://clarepbrierley.blogspot.co.uk/...

I never heard of Penelope Farmer prior to reading Charlotte Sometimes, but now I want to track down all her books and read them. Charlotte Sometimes is her most famous novel and even has a song based on it by The Cure. Charlotte Makepeace is sent to an English boarding school in 1958. Every other day she wakes up to find that it is 1918 and everyone thinks she is Clare Mobley – even Clare’s sister Emily. When Charlotte (as Clare) is sent to board with a family in town, she becomes trapped in 1918. World War I is an important part of the book. Charlotte/Clare stays with a family that has lost their only son in the war. Charlotte sees the wounded soldiers returning from the war, the prejudice and cruelty of the boarding school girls toward a student that is half-German, spies on a séance that her boarding family holds hoping to contact their dead son and celebrates Armistice Day.
I’m attaching a link to a video of The Cure’s song Charlotte Sometimes. The first part of the video reminds me of the creepy front cover of the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wih15...

If I had read this book as a child I'm sure it would have been a favourite, and then imagine my surprise when I discovered The Cure and recognised the words.
But it all happened the other way around. I only found this book through luck and chance, not knowing before that it had even existed, and yay, I'm not too old to enjoy it.

A wonderful story of time-slips and identity crisis (maybe not the right word).. but that feeling of not knowing really who you are, and are you who everyone else thinks you to be..
Charlotte is wonderful. Emily is wonderful. It's all very very nice and sad and sweet and a bit scary.

And all the while the song plays in my head.