On Christmas, when I finished the holiday-themed book I was reading and didn’t have another library book handy, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf. The movie kept showing up in the “Holiday” collection on Disney+, so I thought it would work as a seasonal book (mostly I think the Christmas association comes down to the brief appearance by Father Christmas). From there, I ended up going through the rest of the series. I hadn’t re-read these in at least 20 years, so it’s been a fun nostalgia trip.

I just finished with The Silver Chair, which was my entry into the series, in a way. I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy a few years before during my horse phase, when I went through the library systematically checking out every book with “horse” in the title or a horse on the cover, but since that’s the one book entirely from the perspective of someone from that world so that there’s no portal travel, it reads like just another talking horse book if you don’t have the context, and I didn’t read any other books in the series then (they didn’t have “horse” in the title and I moved on to the next horse book). But I got a copy of The Silver Chair when I was 11 and became utterly obsessed with Narnia.

Looking at it now, I can see why it particularly got to me in a way that I don’t think would have worked if I’d read the first book first. I like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I don’t think it would have grabbed me. The Silver Chair is one of those books that feels like it was written just for me in a way the AI bros wish their machines could do for them if they could just come up with the right prompt. And yet, the book was written long before I was born and the author died before I was born.

At that age, I was most interested in books that had a girl I could relate to as the main character, someone similar to me in some way and around the same age. They never actually give Jill’s age, but she seemed to be around 11 to me, not fully a child but not yet a teenager. I found it easy to identify with Jill, who ended up being buddies with a guy (I was the kind of girl who easily made friends with boys without being a tomboy). I was fascinated with the idea of British schools where they wore uniforms because the older sister of my best friend at the time went to boarding school in England (we were living in Germany), and she’d come home on breaks wearing her school blazer (which was pretty pretentious, now that I think about it, but at the time I thought it was cool). I thought it would be great to get to wear uniforms to school. In fact, I signed up for Girl Scouts that year mostly because I liked the idea of wearing a uniform to school at least one day a week. But I also loved the idea of dressing up like a princess, so a book in which a girl around my age started the book in a school uniform and ended up in a princess-like dress while hanging out with a boy was sure to catch my interest.

Then there’s the story. It’s a quest in a way that none of the other Narnia books are. They have a clear story goal and go on a journey to get to it, with adventures along the way. I love a quest/journey story. The fun thing about this one is that it’s a girl who’s sent on a quest to rescue a prince, flipping the usual fairytale dynamics. So, we’ve got a girl from out world who gets to journey to a land right out of a Disney movie and rescue a prince from an evil witch. That’s like all my favorite things thrown together.

From there I went on to read the rest of the series, and that was when I realized I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy, only this time I understood the significance of those visiting kings and queens in that book. The Silver Chair is still my favorite, though. I wish they’d gotten around to making that movie when they made the others. The budding romantic in me had always imagined that Jill and Eustace would end up together, and since the actor who played Eustace would have been a teen by the time they made the movie at the rate they were going, they could have played with some subtle subtext there. He was so good in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so I really wanted to see how he’d do in The Silver Chair. I guess we’ll have to see how the Netflix version goes, though I’d have to get Netflix to see it. The BBC version wasn’t too bad. The special effects were absolutely awful, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum was brilliant.

In a case of what might have been, not long after the horse phase came the witch phase, in which I read all the books with “witch” in the title (all the girls in my neighborhood were obsessed with reruns of the series Bewitched), but I got sidetracked when I hit the Nancy Drew book The Witch Tree Symbol (which turned out to be about the Pennsylvania Dutch and not about witches at all) and went on a mystery kick, abandoning the witches. That would have been about one library shelf before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Would I have fallen into Narnia then, or would I have been disappointed because it was the wrong kind of witch?

I’ve also been rewatching the movies as I’ve gone through the books. Tonight I’m up for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.