CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES by Penelope Farmer
New York Review of Books Children’s Collection, originally 1969, reissue 2007

Charlotte Sometimes might be almost 40, but it feels fresh. For me, there is something irresistible about boarding school stories and this one is a humdinger. Charlotte is the new girl in school and feels out of place. When she wakes up the second day of school, she feels even more out of place, because for some reason everyone is calling her Clare… and it’s 1918 instead of 1958.

Charlotte and Clare-from-the-past switch bodies every night. The girls can’t help what is happening to them and they are powerless to stop it, so they try to muddle through as best they can by writing notes for each other to find. Still, the switching is disastrous for them. Adjusting to the different manners and expectations of one another’s eras every other day is hard, besides the fact that neither one of them are getting proper sleep and they both excel at different subjects, which is difficult to explain to teachers.

Although this premise sounts wacky, in fact, the whole book is suffused with a slightly eerie and melancholy tone, which is fitting. This is actually a novel about growing older, the inexorability of time and the inevitability of death. Charlotte is able to be a first-hand witness to changes in the country and in the school. When she switches, she sees young women grow old overnight and mighty trees disappear. She is also the victim of a classic time-travel paradox.

*SPOILER*

When Charlotte is trapped forty years in the past, Clare should still be alive in Charlotte’s real time. She’d be a middle-aged woman, perhaps with children of her own in boarding school. However, it’s clear that Clare-as-Charlotte and elderly-Clare can never meet. How can two of the same person be alive at the same time? The answer, of course, is that they can’t. The most moving part of this book is Charlotte’s realization that the girl from the past, whose sister she’s grown to love, whose life she has grudgingly adopted as her own, whose skin she inhabits, is doomed.

This reissue, like all the New York Review of Books Children's Collection, is beautifully packaged in hardcover. Some Brit slang might hinder younger or less able readers, but it should be appropriate for those aged 10+.

This is the first of my "Recommendations from Under the Radar" for today - but I should get more up in the next couple of hours!