Charlotte varannan dag (1969)

I read this when I was young but it must have been a library copy because I never had a copy. Memory made it much better than it was, the writing is clumsy and far too modern and misses the beat all too often. Still, there is a little spark here and there, I did feel Charlotte's sense of dislocation at times. The oddest bit was to have the 1918 flu pandemic be such a feature while I am at home in COVID shutdown.

On Charlotte's first day at boarding school she feels out of place and unsure of who she really is, but when she wakes up the next morning in the same bed only 40 years in the past, she becomes even more unsure of her own identity. She spends most of the school year, then, switching places each night with Clare, a boarding school girl from the past, and it seems a fun adventure until Clare and her sister are sent to stay somewhere off the grounds, which strands Charlotte in the past and Clare in the future.
A fair-to-middling time travel book for Middle Graders, which is somewhat saved by the interesting plot twist at the end. I think it could have been a much more interesting story if we could also get Clare's point of view as well as Charlottes, perhaps in alternate chapters. ( )

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? ( )

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? ( )

Charlotte finds it difficult to sleep her first night at boarding school, but she does manage to drift off in the uncomfortable bed. Waking in the middle of the night, she sees a cedar tree looming outside her window, outlined by a silver moon. The tree had not been there the night before.