The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C. S. Lewis managed to do a very creative fantasy adventure, with relatable characters. But that doesn't get the level of epicity that it potentially achieves as a result of hasty situations.

The story follows four young protagonists and how they become involved in a war (after escaping from one), which they conform to even having the opportunity to return home (the quick and conflict-free way in which they accept their situation seems unreal to me). Still, the characters are well written and lovable, not just the protagonists.

The plot is very well structured and the result is very convincing. But after the hardest moment in the book, everything is solved almost out of nowhere (the fall of the villain, the difficulties of the position of our heroes, the war itself).

That gives me to understand that the most important thing is the twist of the script that, is true that it serves its purpose. But does not seem so remarkable as to give it the power to resolve all conflicts.

In spite of everything (and even if it doesn't seem like it) I liked this book. It convinced me (although not at the level of the distant memory of the film). And I plan to read its sequels. I don't know if I'll ever read them all.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are inspirational and full of adventure! When Lucy stumbles upon a hidden world inside a wardrobe, she and her siblings are launched into the winter world of Narnia as they are called upon to battle the White witch and fight alongside the armies of Aslan, the mighty lion! This story is the kind of story that make me want to open my closet and see if I could find Narnia. The story is filled with messages of hope, forgiveness, and the saving power of grace! It is a story that will warm your heart and spark your imagination simultaneously! If you love fantasy, you need to read this book!

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an amazing read for those that enjoy fantasy and adventure! I thoroughly enjoy how well-written this book is and how the character development is good and then transforms to great later on in the story. Not only are the characters entertaining, but the settings are entertaining as well. I love the transformation that occurs between a dreary reality to the magical world of Narnia. The writing escalates into an amazing plot in a battle of good versus evil, and leaves a bit of suspense thrown in there to leave you wondering what happens next. This book may have cliff-hangers at nearly the end of each chapter, but it only keeps me going and wanting to read more!

This book was much shorter than I had thought it would be. In the beginning of the book, I disliked Edmund even more than I did in the movie version of "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe". But, in the end he was a pretty good character, and I forgave him for everything he did. I'm going to start reading "The Horse and His Boy" soon, and I really hope it's as good as this.

Reading this right after the Magician’s Nephew leaves me with two big takeaways.

1. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the better introduction to Narnia.

2. CS Lewis’ fantasy writing got better later in the series.

While TLTWATW is the better introduction to Narnia, the writing in The Magician’s Nephew felt much more polished. I’m a couple chapters into The Horse and His Boy (another later Narnia book) and it reaffirms this theory. While TLTWATW does an excellent job, I don’t think Lewis fully mastered writing stories that were accessible to children without watering down his writing style until a little bit later in this series.

TLTWATW is a classic, and it tells an important story, but the characters and places don’t feel as fleshed out as the later stories. It almost feels more like an outline. Thankfully it’s a phenomenal outline, one with such a rich history and excellent sequels, so it allows the reader to fill in all the gaps with their own imagination.

I spent the last two years reading a lot of epic fantasy (Stormlight and Wheel of Time), and it left me wanting to know, how did Peter learn to be such a good swordsman? How did the Beavers live so close to the Queen without her knowing about them? What in the world is going on with Father Christmas? Who is this other lion? DEEP MAGIC!? This isn’t epic fantasy though, and those questions don’t really need to be answered. This book does exactly what it needs to do (introduce the world and it’s magic) and it does it very well.

My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

I'll be completely honest: I don't think

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe really "holds up" to an adult audience. Which is not a serious criticism of Lewis's work—he was writing for children—but it’s a bit sad to come back and find none (or at least very little) of the magic that delighted me as a child. I suppose I have become a very boring grown-up.

One thing I found interesting was how I remembered, quite literally, none of the prose. Every other childhood favorite that I've recently reread has lines, sometimes whole paragraphs, that were just burned into my brain (even when the characters and plots were fuzzy in my memory). I can't say whether this is because I was reading Narnia at a relatively younger age, or if I didn't reread

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as many times as I'd thought, or if the prose is just not as noteworthy—but the absence of memorable lines definitely stood out to me.

Lewis's prose is, in a word,

charming. He is spare and straightforward and leaves much to the imagination of his young readers, who he occasionally addresses directly. For example, at one point he refers to

“other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book”, and he regularly interjects with comments like

“And now of course you want to know what had happened to Edmund.”. He also admonishes his readers multiple times that locking oneself in a wardrobe is a

very silly thing to do, which I find quite endearing as he is clearly worried about young children trying to follow his characters' example and getting themselves into trouble. In a nutshell, it feels very much like Lewis has sat down and is telling you a story, which is certainly the intended effect.

To be more specific, it feels like Lewis is telling a

fairy tale, again a deliberate choice on his part. Lewis was mad for fairy tales, and myths too, and their influence is clear. In fact, to populate Narian, Lewis draws from a somewhat eclectic assortment of fairy tales, classical myths (mythic creatures like fauns and centaurs and unicorns make an appearance, and even the Roman god Bacchus gets a shout-out), Biblical myths (perhaps most surprisingly, the White Witch is the daughter of Lilith, the first wife of Adam according to Judaic mythology), and the Bible itself (most obviously with Aslan as the allegorical equivalent of Jesus, but Lewis also tackles some broader theological concepts, such as the goodness

and terribleness of God).

I’ve seen some criticism that the Narnia books are too straightforward: the children are all (mostly) good, Aslan is good, the White Witch is evil, the biblical allegories are obvious, the morals of the stories are clear. There is no moral ambiguity or morally complex characters; Narnia is a land of black and white, not gray. And that is entirely the point.

As an adult, though, I want more from a book.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is Lewis creating his own myth and giving it to the reader à la carte, but that’s not enough to capture my attention and emotions: I want atmosphere and prose and three-dimensional characters. (Lewis, I know, would disagree. But I do not love myths the way he did.) And Narnia, at least this installment, sadly does not have much to offer there.

The one criticism I will maintain as perfectly fair, even considering Lewis’s audience, is this: it is

insane that Father Christmas shows up. It seemed strange as a kid and makes even less sense as an adult.

I am still keeping the 5-star rating because that is what I would have given it as a child. (As an adult, it would probably be a 3-star read, but that really isn't relevant.) I also do plan to continue on with my reread of the series in publication order, or at least of

Prince Caspian and

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as those were two of my favorites and I wonder if I might like them better as an adult.

Some favorite passages:

Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?”

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

[an allusion to Lewis’s famous “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument]

“Wherever is this?” said Peter’s voice, sounding tired and pale in the darkness. (I hope you know what I mean by a voice sounding pale.)

People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to these two.

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.

And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live.

And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep-chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgment. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant. So they lived in great joy and if ever they remembered their life in this world it was only as one remembers a dream.

And that is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.

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Original review (pre-reread): I read this series numerous times as a child.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was definitely one of the ones I loved and reread most: Lucy stepping through the wardrobe has deservedly become a classic moment in children's fantasy, and I loved the fairy-tale feel of this book in particular.

I always did find it strange that Santa Claus ("Father Christmas") makes an appearance, though. Also, I still don't know what Turkish Delight tastes like.

a classic

I didn't read this book as a child, which is a pity. I remember very well that as a child I wanted to read it, but somehow I couldn’t. First, it was rather unavailable in my libraries. Of course, back then, I wanted to read this book in my native language. Unfortunately, the circulation of these books was running out and there was no reprint. So my school and local libraries either had one copy for a long waiting list, or they didn't have one at all. I wanted to read this book even more since I received one of the further books in this series as a gift. Unfortunately, I didn't make it then.

Luckily it was now possible thanks to it being now available as an e-book. And so the problem of it being out of print was solved. Anyway, I am convinced that after the success of the movies, the book was reprinted, so it is now much more available, also in paper form.

I'm not sure if I've seen the movie adaptation of this story. Apart from the main outline, I didn't know the plot. It turned out to be much more complicated and extensive than I expected. A few things surprised me.

I haven't read children's books for a long time. So I was surprised how quickly it all happened. I am used to a situation in books for adults where individual events last much longer, there is more time for reflection, for a detailed description of the situation, for thinking about the motives of the actions of the characters. Here, the most important thing was for something to happen all the time. It didn't bother me, but it's definitely not what I'm used to.

I am very glad to finally read this book. It is a pity that I did not manage to do it in my childhood, when this story would have made a much greater impression on me. But I believe that this story ages very well and it will bring a lot of joy to many more children in the decades to come. It is also a book that adults can read with quite an enjoyment.

I read several versions and each one captivated me. I am so happy to see this type of book available for children.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is an exceptional and unique book, which captures the imagination by creating a very real, fantasy world.