I don't re-read many books, but this is one I've re-read many times. This is the first time I've read it in my 30s, though, so it's been a long time, and I was pleased to find that it's still really good.

The novel follows Charlotte as she switches places in time with a girl named Clare each time they both sleep in the same bed at their boarding school, decades apart. No one seems to notice that she isn't Clare, and when she returns to being Charlotte every other day, she struggles in her own life as well. Eventually her identity begins to dissolve as she spends more and more time as someone else.

There were parts I remembered word for word and parts I didn't recall at all, and there were small observations I'm sure went over my head as a child that now felt surprisingly deep and nuanced for a book I first enjoyed at around nine or ten years old. I think in some ways I've been the same person all my life, though, because this feels very on brand for the kind of subject, questions, and writing that still appeal to me almost 30 years later. It's a little like being able to switch places with that long-ago me and remember her just for a little while.

Time slip novel with additional notoriety from The Cure. Best of the three Aviary Hall books. I liked the book, especially the ending, but honestly Kindred was much better.

This is told from Charlotte's perspective. It also involves Clare, who we really only know through notes, and Emily, who has some resemblance to Charlotte's sister (from The Summer Birds and Emma in Winter). Early on, Emily becomes a brat unleashed from lack of Clare, but she ultimately matures. This book contains less of the descriptive language of the earlier books, which is a shame - the historian in me would love to know more about how the location changed between times.

While the books in the series contain the same Makepeace sisters, each of the three stories is self contained. Charlotte here doesn't think about flying, or wonder much about Emma - but perhaps that's in character, as she lives her new life at boarding school.

Finally a note about The Cure. Robert Smith's song is a nod to this book, but more in the resonance of the title than anything else. Based on reviews here, folks coming from the song to the book are mostly disappointed by the different Charlotte's. I went the other way 'round, and was disappointed by the song, so there you are.

I was so impressed by Penelope Farmer's 'Charlotte Sometimes'. It is a story of a girl growing older, of adjusting to life away from home for the first time, or a new life amongst unfamiliars.

What I appreciated most about the book were the implications it carried with it in regards to what it *is* to grow older. I think it's something of an impulse to think of childhood as something merely left behind—or that, we enter adulthood at the expense of a broad vivacity which gives our formative years their brilliant hue. Or that more pointedly, adulthood is entered in the same way we would cross into an unknown at the cost of the so-called simplicity of childhood. Though I am not well-versed in the juvenile level coming-of-age tale, I can at least cite Jerry Spinelli's 'Hokey-Pokey' of what I understand to be an example of the above, but I hope that I may do this without detracting from Hokey-Pokey, which I enjoyed when I read it about a year ago. There too, we have a tale rich in imagination. Still, I think, with aim to inform preference, I prefer Charlotte Sometimes.

Our Charlotte has gone off to boarding school, the year being 1969 (presumably, as this is when the book was released). By sleeping in a magical bed by the window or her dormitory, she is transported back to 1918, waking up as 'Clare'—a girl with a different sister, a different home life, a different identity. She is haunted by what is expected of Clare, of living up to Clare, while at the same time making room for 'Charlotte' in this strange world. Despite the differences the boarding school has undergone in 50 odd years, there is a familiarity which renders the school that much more erie. Throughout the book Charlotte/Clare not only gradually learns to enjoy herself in this new world, but begins build a relationship between past and present, between herself and the strange contexts to which she suddenly finds herself thrown into.

At risk of spoiling the book, I will leave the beautiful details of how Farmer accomplishes this to the reader—suffice to say that through this strange shade of time travel Charlotte learns that the gathering of one's identity is a negotiation between the self and its world. There cannot only be the 'one' or the simple 'will', as it exists , if alone, in a paradox. She comes out of this experience as one who has learned sympathy, responsibility, the importance of history and its creative power, as a girl I would like to consider to be a burgeoning adult.

Overall, I think the picture of adulthood that Farmer gives the reader is not one of loss. It shows the growth and the (albeit different) creative power and understanding of oneself that gives young adulthood its distinction from childhood. Charlotte learns who it is to be Charlotte not through 'asserting Charlotte', but through 'negotiating Charlotte' with the idea of Clare. Only then can she really appreciate and know what is 'is' to be Charlotte.

By the way, you might be wondering, "was the only reason you read this book because it served as the inspiration of The Cure's song 'Charlotte Sometimes' "? Totally! It just goes to show, sometimes it pays heartily to trust your whims.


-AF

4.5
Unsettling. So simple. Glass marble, factual, complete and mysterious.