Once Was a Time by [Sales, Leila]In 1940 Charlotte Bromley and Kitty McLaughlin are best friends. When Charlotte's father, a scientist, discovers something that the Germans will want, Charlotte has to make a hard decision. Should she stay with Kitty or travel somewhere in time and place. Her decision leaves her alone in the world. She does not know what happens with Kitty. She knows she has to find a way to return to her friend.

This book is written for children in grades 4-6. I believe, although it is intense, children in these grades will love this book. It is a wonderful story of friendship, and the idea of time travel.

This beautifully written book is exciting and the ending is perfect. I highly recommend this book.

I was given this book by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. ( )

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program. I was sucked in, stayed up all night to finish it; the emotions grab at you, both Lottie's epic search for Kitty but also the more mundane schoolyard hurts and pressures, those are perhaps even more grabbing, as they feel very true to life, and remind me of my own bookish childhood.

Unfortunately, a lot of this book was pretty unbelievable--and I'm not talking about the time travel! Lottie didn't exactly land on her feet when tossed up on the shores of time, but she did get very, very lucky; her experience with foster care had none of the hardships I have heard of from friends who were in the system in real life. You can let the book sweep you along past that hurdle of incredulity, but at the end it when it turns out coincidences rarely are, you have to start wondering what time traveling guardian angel was watching over Lottie. There's also some very convenient surprise money to fix all sorts of problems. I feel like there's the bones of a great book here, but in some places the story just took the easy way out.

What a delightful read. The fanciful cover and blurb drew me in, and the fast-paced story kept me hooked. Opening in the middle of war-torn Bristol of the 1940s, Once Was a Time is the story of a friendship between two 10-year-old girls: Lottie and Kitty. Books written for children can feel tiresome when read as an adult, but author Leila Sales manages to capture her young protagonist's voice in a way that feels authentic: neither aging her inappropriately nor making her gratingly naive. Showing the strength of Lottie and Kitty's friendship through time and space, the novel offers a lovely mix of historical, contemporary and sci-fi/fantasy.

Note: I received an advance reader's copy from Chronicle Books. ( )

A very good story that I would have given, most likely, 4**** if there weren't some credibility problems to it.

In particular, the child welfare system just doesn't work the way Sales portrays it. If a ten-year-old girl is found sleeping overnight in a library, the first thing that happens is that she's sent to a hospital and checked out for sexual abuse. Then, considering that she's told a librarian that she's a time traveler, she winds up on a psychiatric couch being analyzed for some kind of dissociative disorder or other. And since she speaks with a British accent, the U.S. State Department is alerted and informs the British embassy that the child welfare folks in Sutton, Wisconsin, have a missing British kid on their hands. And those child welfare folks in Sutton, Wisconsin, are particularly anxious to find the kid's parents so they have someone to go after for child support when they place the kid in foster care.

I had a fairly good suspicion of how this book was going to end, based on the twist in an earlier novel, Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes, to which Once Was a Time (including the heroine's first name, "Charlotte") bears some definite resemblance. I rated the earlier novel 4****, however, when I read it some half-dozen or so years ago, and the earlier novel does seem to read a bit more credibly than Once Was a Time — perhaps because the earlier novel presents a bit more as fantasy and, unlike Once Was a Time, doesn't even attempt to aim at scientific credibility.

Still, the twist ending to Once Was a Time does have enough difference from the earlier novel that I'm not going to cut Once Was a Time's rating because of its somewhat similarity to the earlier book. ( )

I was quickly drawn into the story of Lottie and Kitty, best friends in war time England. Lottie's father is an absent minded professor/inventor type and his area of expertise is time travel. Just think of how helpful that would be to either side in the war.

At a critical juncture, when the girls are in danger, Lottie escapes through a time portal and ends up in America in 2013. At first it is a real shocker to her but things are not so different. Girls of a certain age are still school children. Only it is different this time around, suddenly she is popular. Will that distract her from her search to find out what happened to her best friend, Kitty? ( )