After sharing our own list of time-travel books, book blogger Louise Nettleton has put together this list of her favourites. Many thanks to Louise for this guest blog.
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Time travel is popular in children’s fiction because it allows characters from the present day to experience events from the past or future.
These stories usually begin with a character in the present day with a problem, who is looking at it in a rigid way. By travelling in time, the character gains a new perspective on their problems as well as learning about how their setting looked in a different era.
I discovered Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer as a child and my love of time travel began. What stuck with me about the novel was the way Charlotte, the main character who travels from her boarding school in the Sixties (contemporary to the publication of the novel), to the time of the first world war, finds traces of her historical adventure in the present day. Time travel is a genre which connects us with the people of the past.
As a teenager, I read lots of adult fiction, but returned to children’s literature during my early 20s when I was studying for my degree. One of the first things I did was go in search of other time travel novels, scouring second-hand bookshops and consulting blogs.
Since then, several more great titles have been published. Here are some time travel stories for children. I have put the historical settings in brackets to help people looking for specific eras.