Book eleven of my 2019 Reading Challenge.
C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
As I said in my last review, The Magician’s Nephew, I’ve never read the Chronicles of Narnia so I’m continuing the series and the next is what I would argue is the most well-known book in the series because of the film adaptation from Disney.
What most people don’t know is that BBC actually made the books into films in the 80s. These were the movies that I first saw and loved which prompted me to buy the books, which I never read, so I’m playing catchup now.
Anyway, for the first written book, second in the series, it’s pretty much exactly like the movies.
Since the books are very short and to the point, the movie follows it very accurately. In fact, if I remember correctly, there was more added to the movie to make it more action-packed. There were some parts of the book that were more simple than the movie was.
Something that I found quite humorous as a reader was the obvious disdain and utter dislike that the narrator had for Edmund. If you know the series then you know that Edmund is not the ideal sibling and he can be extremely irritating. Since he almost caused the downfall to all of Narnia it makes sense that the narrator disliked him (I certainly did), but even after Edmund’s triumph as an ally in the final battle, the narrator seemed to not fully trust him still.
Another aspect that I’ve found in the last book as well as this book is the lack of strong detail. Now I do understand that these are children’s books, but more detail for a young reader allows for the imagination to process more, so I’m not sure why characters are barely described and the scenery is a brief sentence rather than a robust paragraph. It is one aspect of children’s books that I crave more of while reading them.
Other than that, just as the last book, I enjoyed reading it and will continue with the series.
I know that’s not much for a book review, but if you’ve seen the movie then you know most of the story anyway.
Stay tuned for one of these two books for my next review: the third book in the Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy or Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers.
Kelsey (KJ) Fagan 
