This is their reality, and it doesn’t matter why it’s happening, they just have to deal with it. This works without an explanation because the young girls being subjected to the time-travel just accept it without explanation. There’s something magical about the bed that only makes Charlotte and Clare switch places, but no one else. The time-travel itself is left as a fantastical mystery, rather than being given a scientific explanation. Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that? (page 66) What makes Charlotte Charlotte? Is she still Charlotte when she’s being called Clare? Why does hardly anyone notice that Clare has changed? Or Charlotte for that matter? The book thus addresses identity issues that middle grade readers might be going through, but in a subtle way through the time-travel trope. In addition to the usual issues time-travel books bring up, such as what stays the same and what is actually different throughout time, it also brings up the key question of identity. (I get a migraine when the barometric pressure changes….I can only imagine how I’d feel if I time travelled! Do you think I could bring my green lamp therapy with me?) The concept is intriguing, because instead of time-travel happening once and landing the person stuck in the past (or future), Charlotte keeps switching, spending every other day in the 60s and every other day in the teens. No mention is made of the events in the first book, and the second book is actually about what Charlotte’s little sister does while she’s away at boarding school. This book is the third in a series, but it is completely possible to read it as a standalone. A fun middle grade book that introduces to the reader to two different past time periods–the late 1960s of Charlotte’s present and the nineteen-teens of Clare’s present. This looked like the best of both worlds to me. I picked this book up because I have an affinity for both boarding school books and time-travel books. This pattern continues, meaning both she and Clare are Charlotte….sometimes. The next morning, though, she wakes up in the present again as Charlotte. When she wakes up, though, the view from the window looks different, and people are calling her Clare! She discovers she’s traveled back in time to the same bed in the same boarding school, but during World War I.
When Charlotte goes away to boarding school for the first time, she’s very excited to get the bed with the particularly pretty wheels right next to the window.
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