Charlotte Sometimes is a children's novel by the English writer Penelope Farmer, published in 1969 in Britain and the United States.

[2] The story follows a girl starting at boarding school who finds one morning she has traveled mysteriously back more than 40 years and is known as Clare.

This was rewritten as the first chapter of The Summer Birds (1962), her first book featuring Charlotte and Emma Makepeace.

Charlotte Sometimes was first published in 1969 by Harcourt in the United States, and by Chatto & Windus in the UK in the same year.

[4] Penelope Farmer arranged many incidents in Charlotte Sometimes ahead of time based on family experiences.

She wrote, "Emma and Charlotte have grown in their own ways and aren't exactly based on my mother and her sister now, but this is where it started.

[6] Elements in the book based on the school include the pillared front door, the glass verandah and the cedar tree, which still stands, as of 2020.

Inside her room, which is now being used as the school sickroom, Charlotte finds the bed is occupied, and thus she cannot return home.

Emily tells of the wretchedness of being motherless and unwanted, moving between homes while her father fights in the war.

The war is over: people dance and celebrate in the street, and Charlotte and Emily join in, even though it would anger Mr Chisel Brown.

Because of the flu epidemic the students are able to play wild games in the dormitories, and eventually Charlotte is able to sleep in the bed that will return her to her own time.

On arriving back, Charlotte is startled to learn that her roommate Elizabeth had deduced the truth about her swap with Clare.

Charlotte places the marbles from the solitaire set in a jar and fills it with water, which the other girls admire.

[10] The first novel featuring Charlotte and Emma Makepeace was The Summer Birds, published in 1962, set in the South Downs in southern England.

While writing Emma in Winter, Farmer was unaware that identity was such a dominant theme in the book.

"[14] Charlotte Sometimes continues the theme, begun in Emma in Winter, of time travel into the past.

We sense the meaning of Charlotte's changes of identity in the way that she senses them herself.... [It is] a book of quite exceptional distinction... a haunting, convincing story which comes close to being a masterpiece of its kind...."[16] Children's novelist Eleanor Cameron wrote, "Farmer writes with style.

She continues, "Farmer is always gifted in her grasp of possibilities that bring us up short with surprise and delight and satisfaction.

"[17] Neil Millar in The Christian Science Monitor wrote, "Charlotte Sometimes is a book of quite exceptional distinction....

[17] Children's publisher Margaret K. McElderry wrote, "[Charlotte Sometimes] is a fascinating exploration of the fragile barriers between layers of time, handled with great skill in the writing and delicacy of perception.

It is probably Penelope Farmer's finest novel – complex, taut, not a word wrong – and it thoroughly deserves the popularity it has attained.

"[14] Peggy Heeks writes in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers that Charlotte Sometimes "shows a brilliant handling of the time-switch technique and a sincerity which rejects slick solutions to the dilemmas of the two heroines.

"[21] Gersen continues, "Adolescence is all about forging an identity, and this novel speaks to those questions of “who am I?” and “how do other people see me?” in an abstract, haunting way.

These include a poignant episode where Charlotte, back in her own time, receives a package and a letter from Clare's sister, Emily, as an adult.

The 1985 edition ends with Charlotte and Elizabeth finding Clare's exercise book, hidden in the leg of the bed for over forty years.

[23] Daphne Jones adapted the text as a serial, and the programme featured photographs by Jimmy Matthews Joyce.

",[29] and to several events near the end of the book: people dancing in the streets at Armistice; and a school walk when Charlotte cries upon hearing of Clare's fate.

In 2007, Penelope Farmer herself wrote another novel, Lifting the World, in which a high school student writes a story in class with a similar premise to Charlotte Sometimes.

In Jessamy, written in a matter-of-fact style, a young girl experiences a time-slip, with the narrative switching between World War I and the present day.