KATE SAUNDERS, BESWITCHED, SCHOLASTIC (MARION LLOYD BOOKS) £5.99 9+

Who can fail to love a school story? From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the Worst Witch, education provides both the real and the fictional stage on which childhood’s triumphs and disasters are dramatised. Yet as parents and politicians well know, schools have changed considerably since our grand-parents’ time.

Kate Saunders’s Beswitched begins with the thoroughly modern Flora Fox being sent to a luxurious liberal boarding school for a term. Somehow, she magically switches places with another Flora in 1935 and goes instead to St Winifred’s, where the food is vile, the underwear repulsive and the teachers unbelievably hairy. How can she possibly survive without her lap-top, iPod and Jacqueline Wilsons? Why is she in the past, and how can she get back to 2010?

All of these questions are answered in the course of one of the most enchanting, funny and suspenseful stories for 9+ to have been published for some time. Like Eva Ibbotson, Saunders has the gift for depicting benign, wildly eccentric adults and sensible, sympathetic children colliding in plots that are almost plausible. Our heroine is in shock the moment she encounters St Winifred’s, where attitudes are gorgeously illiberal. When the Headmistress, Miss Powers-Prout tells her that the other Flora’s father is in India, “That’s to glory of the British Empire...You are at home in every corner of the world,” it’s impossible not to heave a sigh of nostalgia as well as embarrassment.

 Beswitched could only have been written by someone steeped in Angela Brazil, Elinor Brent-Dyer and Enid Blyton, because of course what makes Flora’s sojourn turn from gloom to fun are her dorm-mates, Pete, Pogo and Dulcie. Unlike other forays of this kind, Beswitched is less a St. Trinian’s style send-up than a joyous celebration of the conventional British girls’ public school and its passions, privations and enduring female friendships. Elinor Brent-Dyer's immortal Chalet School series (still available, along with many others in the genre, from the heroic publisher Girls Gone By) is however the chief inspiration.  From the moment you hear one of Flora’s new dorm-mates shouting, “You utter putrid BEAST!” you know you are in for a romp, complete with sneaks, tuck, bullies and larks. Although the time-travel element has been done before in Charlotte Sometimes, Penelope Farmer’s 1969 children’s classic, Saunders’s book is not about a child’s loss of identity but its opposite. Flora retains her “unique character”, and she discovers, ultimately, what she has in common with her rejected grandmother.

Initially, Flora is furious – and hilarious. Her knowledge of astronomy and science astounds her teachers, but her ignorance of History and Latin appals them. (‘“If this is the kind of gel they’re sending from the Colonies these days,” Miss Harbottle said, “I DESPAIR.”’) Her accent makes her sound like a kitchen-maid, she has no deportment, and although her new friends try to cover up for her she’s soon in hot water over her prep. But slowly she adapts, and begins to like it.

For all the comedy, Flora’s transportation to 1935 has a serious purpose. As with other first-rate time travel tales, from Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon the Cut-Purse to Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Bomb, foreknowledge is not necessarily salvation.“There’d be some point to you if you knew the names of all the horses that are going to win the Derby, so we could bet all our pocket money and get rich. But all you do is drivel on about things that won’t be invented til we’re old,” one girl remarks. The point of Flora’s journey, when it is finally revealed, is both charming and moving. Beswitched is pure bliss. Don’t miss it.