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Charlotte barely even thinks about the fact that she's <spoiler>stuck in the wrong time</spoiler>. Days pass without a mention of it.

An *extremely* anticlimactic fight with the Chaos Lords.

Charlotte is really taking her new horrific situation very much in stride.

He rescues his wife, and Moorcock makes a pretty poor excuse for why they don't have any dialogue with each other, and the book ends. I say "book" because although Moorcock introduced this as his first Elric novel, it's four short stories tied together as "books".

Boo for a likeable recurring character getting killed offscreen. Also, Elric sure isn't using much brainpower in this book. Hmm, I wonder what this prophecy means? Oh well, let's just keep going west. Some good dialogue, though.

What doesn't make sense is that Clare is writing daily notes to Charlotte in the diary in the past for her to read in the present, but there's no mention of any entries AHEAD of the current day. Are they creating changes every time they switch places, or is it all supposed to have already happened? If it DIDN'T already happen, then how was Sarah told to be kind to Charlotte BEFORE she started going back in time?

"And there rose up in this time, which was called the Age of the Young Kingdoms, heroes. Greatest of these heroes was a doom-driven adventurer who bore a crooning rune blade that he loathed. His name was Elric of Melniboné, king of ruins, lord of a scattered race that had once ruled the ancient world. Elric, sorcerer and swordsman, slayer of kin, despoiler of his home land, white-faced albino, last of his line."

The dénouement more than makes up for the misery of the second act and the tonally discordant (but awesome) climax.

“Listen, Abby,” he said. “When you came to me and said your friend had a demon from hell nesting in her soul, did I say you were crazy? Did I make fun of you? Nuh-uh. I believed you. Now you need to believe me.”

No, Christian, YOU told ABBY:

“He’s just jealous,” Christian said, turning back to Abby. “I saw a demon haunting your friend. A demon in the shape of a great owl, with his dark shadow obscuring her face.”

Things that should have made a difference:
Abby was there when the doctors asked where Margaret got the tapeworms, but she didn't tell them, nor tell them that Glee also knew about it.
When she was arrested and being interrogated by the police, it never came up that she had just been thoroughly beaten up by someone, as if no one could tell.

More proactivity is good.

I like it, but the author is skipping over too many events of the first days that would be of interest—seeing Charlotte react to the differences between times, and juggling two different groups of new schoolmates and teachers. The characters just aren't getting enough time. But then, this is a short book.

Interestingly, Charlotte is familiar with a whole genre of stories of people going back in time like this.

This is getting kind of exhausting with all the misery.

I hope that by reading this and not having it in my TBR anymore, I can avoid getting the song stuck in my head all day whenever I see the title.

Anyway, the time travel has begun, sort of Quantum Leap-style. She has jumped back in time and taken someone else's place, and she still looks like herself in the mirror when she looks, but other people see her as the girl whose place she took.

The real horror here is how everything's falling apart and how everyone, without fail, refuses to budge from their preconceived notions to examine new evidence.

I'm reading this because I didn't previously know that The Cure's song by the same name was based on this book. This is the second time I've tried a book because Robert Smith wrote a song about it. So far, what we have is a story portraying what it was like in an old boarding school, with very spartan institutional living. But soon there will be time travel.

"Only one thing may overcome him." She shuddered. "You must go to him, offer him your body! Go without weapons, naked. Let him enter you!"

Numbly, Niall said, "Give myself to him. Let him take control of me. That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"It's our only hope."

===
Why is this their only hope? Adonair ran away screaming when Niall hit him with his enchanted sword before, so why not just keep doing that?

“Promise me?” Gretchen demanded, tears slipping out of one eye. The other eye was pink and infected. “Promise me it’s not too late for everything to go back to the way it was.”

Well, you know, she's saying what I'm feeling. I know I signed up for a horror novel, but when you give me something so pleasant and enjoyable at the beginning, then take it away, maybe I'd rather just have more of that.

The green being lifted what was its head. Niall felt the impact of burning eyes. "So, then. You have followed me. That is good," it bellowed.

Simple tip. If you want me to read the character's lines as if he's bellowing them, don't wait until *after* three sentences of dialogue to tell me he's bellowing them! And maybe also try using some exclamation points. You don't generally bellow quietly.

The early part of the book was better.

"In a soft voice it whispered, 'Now, how can you know my name? Certainly there is no mention of me in any human records. Men would never remember me after all this time. How can you know my name?'"

This is the kind of sloppy writing I've come to expect here. Fox can't even keep straight that Adonair *told* Niall his name in the previous chapter:

"Ahh, it has been long—long!—since the race of men knelt to Adonair!"

The time skip had such drastic and unlikely changes to the characters and their relationships, I spent a long time waiting to see if Abby was going to wake up from this seemingly idealised fantasy world where Abby and Gretchen now make up half of the popular girl's clique and they're all at the top of their class, affluent, and can rebel with impunity.

So he accidentally frees an evil god who the other gods had imprisoned behind a brick wall in Niall's basement, with nothing but an ordinary pickaxe (great divine protection there), when he was just trying to expand his wine cellar. Then his lover, the goddess Emelkartha, freaks out that he freed the god. And why didn't she ever mention there was an evil god in Niall's basement? "I had forgotten," she says.

I really didn't like the first couple of chapters set in present day, having the main character reminisce about the 80s and drop foreshadowing (more like spoilers) before actually starting the story in the 80s. Once that was out of the way, I really enjoyed the character drama of the poor unpopular girl getting saved from total disappointment at her unattended birthday party by a new girl who becomes her best friend.