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Great fun! I’d have adored this when I was 9, 10, 11. My 10 year old self gives this 5 full stars. If I wasn’t so in touch with my 10 year old self, I might have given this only 4 stars, but it’s a completely delightful and smart story.
It’s very suspenseful. It’s a fun meld of speculative fiction and historical fiction. Some aspects are ingenious. It was fun to try to figure out who one particular character was.
Charlotte is a wonderful character, and I was particularly fond of Emily. The mostly ...more
It’s very suspenseful. It’s a fun meld of speculative fiction and historical fiction. Some aspects are ingenious. It was fun to try to figure out who one particular character was.
Charlotte is a wonderful character, and I was particularly fond of Emily. The mostly ...more
Time travel and boarding school - how can you beat it?
My friend Ellen tells me that the Cure has a song called Charlotte Sometimes based on this book. How very odd!
My friend Ellen tells me that the Cure has a song called Charlotte Sometimes based on this book. How very odd!
After Charlotte's first night at her new boarding school, she wakes up in the same room, but with different roommates. Moreover, these different roommates don't call her "Charlotte," but "Clare." Charlotte is totally confused and can't figure out what has happened. After a while, she realizes she's travelled back in time to World War I, and that the real Clare has travelled forward to Charlotte's time. Once they realize this, Charlotte and Clare devise a way to correspond with each other across
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An unusual book. It had an old-fashioned feel, like What Katy Did or the All-of-a-Kind Family, but was about a girl who time travels when she sleeps in a certain bed at boarding school. I remember liking it a great deal, at the time, but now can't remember what year it took place and what era she traveled to. WWII?
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Reread. I last read this when I was much younger, and mostly what I remember is that I found it unsettling and strange. For once, my memory is accurate. This is nominally a time travel story, but perhaps because of time’s inexorable march, the English girls’ boarding school in the “modern” ’50s doesn’t seem all that different to someone reading in 2008 (or 199-whatever) from the English girls’ boarding school in the “past” of 1918. Yes, there’s a war going on in the latter, and that ends up play
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This was well worth going back to. I hardly remembered anything about it from when I read it as a child - and of course back then I probably didn’t appreciate how beautiful the descriptive writing is, never at the expense of pace and story.
Why is this not on every list of great children's literature? I liked it just as much as when I was a bookish ten-year-old. Sensitively written in a simple style, with a cast of characters that are nuanced and completely believable, enough so that I cared about them, even the ones that I didn't much like. Time travel fantasy, but at its heart an examination of identity - if everyone thinks you are someone else, who are you? What makes you, you?
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Somehow this story of time travel has always seemed sad, as though it is always raining when I read it, but it is nonetheless still a good book.
May 13, 2008
Ginny Messina
marked it as to-read
Sep 26, 2012
Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides
marked it as to-read
Mar 28, 2014
Nicole
marked it as to-read
Jun 12, 2016
Lisa
marked it as to-read
Sep 11, 2016
Hannah
marked it as to-read
Sep 09, 2017
Katherine
marked it as to-read
Apr 02, 2021
Mihika
marked it as to-read
Jul 31, 2021
Christine
marked it as to-read
