Book Review: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

I remember when I was a kid looking at a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and being intimidated by how big it was. For that reason, I never got around to reading it. I think it must have been a compendium of multiple Narnia stories, because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t that long at all.

I decided that I wanted to read the Narnia series for myself, because I had never actually read them, only seen film adaptations of them. Most of what I’d heard about them was that it was shoving thinly veiled Christianity down children's throats. I’d never picked up on that from the adaptations that I’d watched, so I wanted to see for myself.

Deciding which order to read the books in was more difficult than I’d imagined. There’s the order in which they were originally published or the internal chronological order. I chose the original publication order.

The writing is what I expected. The delivery is the somewhat stuffy style typical of the time and place in which it was written. I like that style though. It’s up front, tells you what to expect. It often goes against the more modern idea of “show, don’t tell” that is pushed so hard on modern authors.

There’s not a lot of depth to the characters. There are four siblings and not a lot of book to get deep into the psychological motivations of each one. I think kids reading are meant to relate to them solely based on gender, age, appearance or birth order. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. It’s like giving kids a template and letting them fill in the rest with their own imagination.

I like the mentions throughout of older magic and prophecies, that’s the kind of thing that draws me into a fantasy story. That there’s something more than our everyday life, that there’s something bigger than us and we’re about to get swept up in it.

Compared to today’s stories for kids it’s probably a bit too simplistic and old-fashioned. From what I recall, the Narnia series as a whole becomes broader and more complex as the books progress, but I think most kids are going to give reading it a miss.

3 out of 5 stars.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe meets criteria eleven for the 2018 Read Harder Challenge.

Have you read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Did you enjoy it? Let me know in the comments below!