A lovely little book. Written in a style and a pace that draws the reader in and keeps the pages turning. Lovely light escapist stuff.

I liked the use of the ampersands, but wasn't convinced that the author quite understood the semantic difference between them and using 'and', which does appear as well. But it added a strange breathy quality to Charlotte's narrative which draws the reader closer to her character. The faux archaic language worked very well until perhaps the last ten pages. When I would have expected her speech to have started to naturalise towards the language of modern London, given her age and her length of time in this era.

The book reminded me a bit of Jasper Fforde's books, The Eyre Affair etc. Perhaps it was the slightly amateur, slightly innocent quality of time travel and tall tales? But also of the Philip Pullman trilogy in the sense that with PP you cut between different time periods/places whereas in the Jensen you have to get into an HG Wells time travel machine to do the same. Also Charlotte reminded me of Lyra somehow. Although one is half the age of the other, both with very different lives and opportunities, the spirit of the characters was very similar - a fierce desire to move forward, to get hold of life and make it work in your favour, an optimism, a delight in being. Urchins made good?

There are a fair few clichés. And some bits just don't add up. And the illustrations were wrong. But hey, I enjoyed it and will look out for other titles by the same author.

RELEASE NOTES:

as above