Charlotte Sometimes

4.5* rounded up for nostalgic reasons.

As a kid I loved, loved, loved this book and re-reading over 30 years later it does not disappoint.

The story itself is fairly unique: Charlotte falls asleep in her 1950s boarding school only to awaken during WW1 having swapped places with a similar girl from that time. At first they alternate in each other's lives but inevitably a situation leads to Charlotte being trapped in the past.

The writing is excellent, atmospheric and almost poetic at times. There is real drama, some mild horror and movingly sad moments.

From reading other reviews it appears that this version (and the one I read as a child that had a much better cover) is missing a final letter from a character in Charlotte's past life and perhaps another chapter. I'll need to search out that edition and give it a read too.

It is interesting, I read this book in Swedish some 20 years ago, and I wouldn't have recognized it.
It is more melancholy than I remember it. I also didn't remember Emily at all.

Charlotte inexplicably finds herself trading spots in time and space with a girl named Clare. Back and forth the two girls go, trading, returning, trading again, returning again, on and on.

I was disappointed, I think, as I was hoping for a deeper story, something more than simply occupying a bed with wheels, and...

SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...

...a richer and more satisfying ending.

She was crying and crying for a girl who had died more than forty years before, whom, in any normal world, to any normal way of thinking, she could not possibly have known; whom she had never even seen, though she had lived as her.