In your typical time travel tale, a character travels into the past. Less commonly, someone journeys forward in time. There are many novels in which a person from the past travels to present time. Such travelers are sometimes referred to as ghosts (ooooooh!). I believe there are time travel books in which someone from the future visits the present, though I haven’t read any yet. (If you encounter one of these travelers in real life, I’d be interested to know how the whole global warming thing worked out.) There aren’t too many stories in which one person travels forward, while another travels back and they switch places. But when this does happen the results can be amazing!
Charlotte Sometimes, Penelope Farmer , (1969, 174 pages) is such a book. This has long been one of my all-time favorite time travel stories. Charlotte is a new girl at a British boarding school in 1963. One morning she wakes up, and it’s the same bed, same school, but a different decade. She has gone back forty-five years! Yet, the other students from 1918 seem to know her as Clare. This happens several times. Charlotte figures out the real Clare has traveled forward to her time. Turns out, the bed Charlotte is sleeping in is the same one Clare slept in so many years ago and yeah, it’s magic.
A problem an author has to solve when writing a time travel story where people switch places is how to make one person a believable stand-in for another. Farmer doesn’t quite say if the girls look exactly alike or only enough alike so no one notices the difference. It could be a little hard to believe either way but when I was reading Charlotte Sometimes, I had no problem just going with it.
The rules and ways of doing things at the school were different forty years before and it’s often hard for Charlotte to know how to act. Clare had a younger sister at the school, named Emily. Emily is the only one who can tell something weird is up with her sister. Charlotte tells her the truth about what’s going on. At first Emily is freaked, but then she becomes Charlotte’s guide to 1918, showing her how things are done. Emily reminds Charlotte of her little sister, Emma, and the two become good friends.
The book is about Charlotte’s struggles. We are not shown how Clare is doing. We only find out via notes Clare leaves in the hollow leg of the bed in which both girls sleep, so many years apart. Actually, in both books reviewed in this post a kid gets a handwritten note from someone in another time. Loved, loved, loved this aspect of the books! In these days of emailing and texting, it’s special to get a real letter from someone. How much more impressive to get a letter from a different time!
Charlotte is pretty busy trying to manage her life, jumping back and forth between the present where she is a new girl at school which is hard enough, and the past which is even more tricky. She does stop to think about how it must be more difficult for Clare, though. In many ways the pace of life was slower in the past and we know some of what it was like from books and movies. But to go into the future where life moves more quickly and so many things would be unfamiliar could be really scary.
One reason things are different in 1918 is because World War I is happening. Reading Charlotte Sometimes, you learn how life is different for everyone during a war. For example, the food wasn’t very good and there was less of it. Also, kids whose fathers were soldiers were worried about them dying. During one of her visits to the past, Charlotte is told she will need to sleep in a different bed. Will Charlotte be stuck in the past and Clare in the future?
I enjoyed reading Charlotte Sometimes as much the second time as the first. The plot of this book is unusual. On top of that, the main characters are so well described they seem like people you might know. You come to really care about what happens to them. Although the book was first published in 1969, it doesn’t seem old-fashioned.
Charlotte is often lonely and feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere. Neither she nor Clare have mothers, and their fathers are not available to talk with even by phone. Spending so much time pretending to be Clare, Charlotte sometimes feels like she’s forgetting who Charlotte is. She feels lost. The book creates a beautiful melancholy mood. Perhaps that unique mood is what inspired The Cure, a famous alternative rock group, to write a song titled Charlotte Sometimes, and an indie-rock singer-songwriter to also take the name.
timetraveltimestwo.com 