Charlotte Sometimes

Charlotte is new, lonely and far from home. Then she wakes up forty years in the past. Charlotte Makepeace’s first day at boarding school is a blur of unfamiliar faces, timetables, rules and whispers. All the other girls know the routine and each other. Charlotte feels lonely, uncertain and out of place. Then, on her very first night, something mysterious happens. She wakes in the same bed, in the same dormitory, in the same school, but not in the same time. Somehow Charlotte has slipped back to 1918, where everyone believes she is another girl called Clare. As Charlotte moves between her own time and the final months of the First World War, she must learn how to live another girl’s life without losing her own. Charlotte Sometimes is one of the great children’s time-slip novels: a boarding-school story shadowed by the First World War. Penelope Farmer captures the strangeness of being new, the ache of being needed by people who do not truly know you, and the fear of being left behind in another girl’s life.