Thus Christina Rossetti idealizes a complex and varied relationship, described and reflected on by countless poets, playwrights, journalists, social scientists and by sisters themselves over the years. If she doesn’t figure out some way to get back to the world she knows before the end of the term, she might never have another chance. Her teachers think she’s slow, the other girls find her odd, and, as she spends more and more time in 1918, Charlotte starts to wonder if she remembers how to be Charlotte at all. And instead of having only one new set of rules to learn, she also has to contend with the unprecedented strangeness of being an entirely new person in an era she knows nothing about. In the months to follow, Charlotte wakes alternately in her own time and in Clare’s. It’s natural to feel a little out of place when you’re the new girl, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she’s baffled: everyone thinks she’s a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918.

to the tricky undercurrents beyond the surface.A time travel story that is both a poignant exploration of human identity and an absorbing tale of suspense. Those who managed to get inside A Castle of Bone will probably Find their way here. There's a disheartening gap, never more apparent then here, between this author's creative, lightly philosophical imagination and the workaday fictional frameworks she builds around it. But though William and Mary are always permitted to escape from the fantasy realm when the going gets wierd, Farmer does create surreal dream experiences that have an eerie impact.

The scenery is often playful and occasionally awe-inspiring, but most youngsters will find William and Mary starchy company, the seashell hunt an awkward device, and the suggestion that wishing can somehow reunite William's separated parents an outright fraud. ''How extraordinarily stupid of us, Mary, not to have looked for it on our own beach,'' says William, but then there would have been no excuse for those amazing transportations into phosphorescent seascapes, a Disney-inspired fish school, an artist's restaging of Atlantis. Wouldn't you just know that after a whole term vacation's worth of undersea fantasy adventures, the missing half of William's magic sea shell is found on the shore, right near school.

William and Mary by Penelope Farmer