Customer Reviews

Charlotte Sometimes

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I read this in the hardback edition when I was a teenager. I loved it so much that when I saw immediately bought it when I saw it on sale as a paperback. What a disappointment! The last chapter was altered so the ending was different. I even got out the original hardcover from the library to check that I wasn't remembering incorrectly - but sadly it was true.

While the new version is very good, it just isn't the same as the original.

I actually read this book when I was a young teen and I have to admit I was only reading it because there was nothing else to read in the house and the telly was on the blink. I absolutely loved it from beginning to end. This is a time-travel story with a bit of a twist.

Charlotte Makepeace is a new girl at an old boarding school. On her first night she goes to sleep in her bed and in the morning she wakes up as Clare Moby, a schoolgirl from over forty years ago. Of course Charlotte is confused, even more so when people don't realise that she is not Clare, not even Clare's younger sister Emily.

Somehow she struggles through her first day as Clare but to add to her confusion she finds herself back in her own time the following day and no one has missed her! Charlotte soon realises that Clare is taking her place in her time and she is taking Clare's. The two girls muddle through by communicating through Clare's diary, leaving each other notes and messages in order for them to survive in their swap-over worlds.

However it's not long before Clare's younger sister Emily realises that something is wrong and Charlotte is forced to tell her the truth. With Emily as an ally, Charlotte's time in the past is a little easier but there is a dark cloud on the horizon. Clare and Emily are going into lodgings outside the school and the children have worked out that the time travelling that they are experiencing has something to do with the bed they sleep in and the tree outside the window which exists only in Clare's time.

This is an exciting story that moves at a fair pace, even more so when Charlotte is trapped in the past, forced to become a day pupil and temporarily forfeit her real life in the future.

Charlotte's identity is soon in question even to herself. Is she Charlotte or is she in fact Clare? Only Emily constant nagging about trying to get the real Clare back keeps the young girl aware of whom she really is.

Charlotte experiences life in England during the First World War. What once was history for her becomes the present, and she suffers with her new friends, as they loose loved ones to foreign battlefields, and face the terror of air raids in the middle of the night.

Charlotte's eventual permanent return to the future is not without its own problems but luckily Clare had her own ally in the form of Elizabeth, a dorm mate who like Emily realised that Clare was not Charlotte and helped her as best she could.

Charlotte's return to the future is not with out a tragic price. Clare, Charlotte finds out died not long after her return to the past, from flu and for a while Charlotte is grief stricken. However redemption comes in the form of a parcel of memories from a now grown up Emily who has waited many years to contact her sister's fellow time traveller in the future.

"Charlotte Sometimes" is a surprisingly dark children's novel with flashes of colour and inspiration as two young girls live lives that are not their own.

It is a poignant story about the loss of those we love and how we have to carry on no matter what. A surprisingly mature book that can be read by both older children and young adults alike.

This is a superbly written children's book from the late 1960s and republished in the 1990s. There is plenty of mystery and you never quite work out why Charlotte is mysteriously transposed in time back to the first world war until the last few pages. I think it's one for slightly older children, perhaps around 10-13, as there are many elements in it around the history of the 1914-18 war which the imaginative teacher could include in class lessons.

It's a great read and I found it difficult to put down, coming back to it fresh after last reading it in my own childhood.

This book has remained one of my favorite YA novels which I discovered as an adult, after the explosion of YA literature in the 60's (too late for my childhood!)

Now any Time Travel book involves careful detailing by the author in advance, to establish the Laws of time travel and avoid anachronisms. How is the protagonist transported back and then forward again in time? (In this case the vehicle is a bed in a girls' dorm.) Must she go back far enough in time to preceed her own birth or can she witness herself at a younger age? Is she allowed to interact with her own ancestors or try to change national or even family history? Can she actually change places with a real person from the Past or merely fit in as an unknown entity in another age? What happens to the person from the Past who is suddenly placed in a modern settting? Won't people in the Past and the Present realize that they are dealing with imposters? Do they look and sound that much alike?

Heavy problems to resolve, but Penelope Farmer handles them all with grace and skill, leaving hardly any loose threads. Her heroine, Charlotte, attends a boarding school where she is pleased but puzzled to be taken under the wing of a kindly older girl--whose mother had asked her to be a special friend to Charlotte, if she ever met her. All throughout the story we keep wondering which of the girls she meets in the Past will turn out to be this sympathetic mother.

Charlotte is trapped on an endless temporal seesaw, never knowing in which Time (40 years' difference) she will awaken. She and her alter-ego, Clare, are doomed to never meet face to face, yet they each learn much about the other. I admired their ingenuity in keeping a mutual journal and hiding notes in the hollowed bedpost. But why does Charlotte allow the girls in the Past to accept her as Clare; she does not protest that they mistake her for someone else. She lets the girls of the Past claim her as their own, which gradually erases her true, contemporary persona. Is she so diss! atisfied with herself and her life that she is willing to become someone else? Will she be destined to remain forever in the Past as Clare? Does she lack the will and desire to preserve her true identity? Will she ever become Charlotte Always? A Fabulous tale which will enthrall and mystify the reader!

Although it is very interesting and well-written, do not read her review, unless you do not mind finding out major aspects about the book's ending.

I read this book years ago, but it still stays in the forefront of my mind. Recently its been stronger than ever thanks to a friend of mine who loves The Cure. Charlotte goes back and forth through time. living her life, and someone elses. She's only Charlotte sometimes, as the title dictates. The story is eerie, but fascinating, Charlotte makes friend with her 'sister" who is not her sister, but the sister of the girl whose life she sometimes lives. She has to keep this fact a secret, and the plot gets deeper and deeper. The end of the book shocked me with the emotion I felt, especially the revelations that comes at the end. It's sad, bittersweet and lovely all at once, this is the kind of book I would keep forever.

Like several people who wrote reviews of this book, I borrowed it because of my fondness for the Cure song of the same name. For you Cure fans out there, from the very first sentence you can see Farmer's influence on the lyrics and the dark mood of the song, which is a great bonus for people who love the song. And the story also stands on its own merits. It is a wonderful story about a young girl who finds herself losing her identity when she switches places with another girl. I highly recommend it to people of all ages.

The local library by my house has just about all of Penelope Farmer's books, and I plan on checking out and reading all of them. I'm still also on a quest to find a copy of Charlotte Sometimes to own myself.

Okay, yeah, I'm glad to find out that I'm not the only person out there who reads books becos some rock star tells her to! But I was just wandering around some Cure sites, and found out that both the songs "Charlotte Sometimes" and "A Letter to Elise" (my favorites, but that's another story) were based on this book. I vaguely rememberd having a copy from when I was wee, so I freed it from the attic and read it, and damn was it great! You don't know quite where it's going until the very end...read it, you'll be glad you did.

A friend picked this up for me because the song of the same name has been my favourite for many years. The song, Charlotte Sometimes, by The Cure was written based on the book.

This sweet story was so well written and an enjoyable read. Its YA fiction, so its short (only about 150 pp) and easy to read, but very hard to put down.

It very much reminded me of Coraline, by Neil Gaiman.

After her first night at an English boarding school, Charlotte wakes up to learn that she is no longer in her own body, but that of another girl named Clare in 1919, whose father is fighting in The Great War.

Aimed at 10-year-old readers, according to its publisher, Charlotte Sometimes is surprisingly mature, not just in content but in writing style as well. Any reader can easily see that this is a novel with substance, and that author Penelope Farmer had a great deal of respect for her audience's intelligence, regardless of their age. Charlotte Sometimes can make any reader's heart ache, not with sappy sentimentality (because it does not need to rely on such element), but because its author wrote with a kind of frankness and honesty that we do not usually find in many of today's juvenile and YA novels.