The Chronicles of Narnia

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The Calormenes - dark-skinned foreigners who worship a savage god Tash, wear turbans and carry scimitar-like swords - are an Englishman's fantasy of the bloodthirsty and lecherous Turk. In their country, young girls are routinely married off to old codgers, and they wage war on the free countries like Narnia to rape and pillage. Their God Tash, however, is a pagan deity who is loosely associated with the gentleman I mentioned earlier - the guy with horns. Nowadays, I recommend Miyazaki movies (especially Kiki) to every tween girl I meet to cleanse their palate of some of the more despicable Disney depictions of femininity, and I happily gift kids (and adults!) with the Dark Materials trilogy to counteract their exposure to the Narnia dogma. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Surprisingly enough -at least for me- it turns out that that place is occupied by The Horse and His Boy, something I was NOT expecting at all. I think it has something to do with the fact that it fills, a little, that big, empty space where I wish there was a novel about the golden age of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis's acclaimed and universally loved novels spring to life in these spellbinding full-cast BBC dramatisations. This dramatization complements the original stories beautifully. Each scene has been carefully crafted with the sort of audio landscape you would naturally expect from any quality BBC production. The Pevensie children return to Narnia after a gap of several hundred years (though to the children only 1 year of our time has passed.) They aid the rightful heir to the throne in his attempts to stop his evil uncle from destroying Narnia.

As fantasies for children go, this is a terrific universe filled with possibilities. There are talking animals, magical creatures from Greek mythology and English fairy-lore, and suitably satisfying and mysterious landscape worthy of exploration again and again. So one feels that if only the author in C. S. Lewis had let himself go he could have produced something similar to the The Lord of the Rings. Are they perfect? No. The Last Battle is a hard and frustrating read. The Magician's Nephew is a little awkward. The Horse and His Boy is just a TAD controversial for some of its content. But they're so, so worth the read. I did enjoy reading these books. I'd thought them awfully dry the first time through—stuffy English children in a fairly entertaining magical land, etc... The difference this time was, I watched the 2005 movie first. The movie completely blew me away, and while reading the first book (and even the succeeding books which involve the Pevensie children) I was able to imagine those warm, courageous and yet flawed children in place of the stuffy English ones, and it added a wonderful new dimension to the story. It was enough to carry me through the boks I didn't like as much, and made me enjoy my favorites even more (those would be The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy). A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.” Prince Caspian: Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund are called upon to help Caspian free Narnia of his evil uncle's regime and reclaim freedom and happiness.

they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments...but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid." Now I could dismiss my love of these books as some quaint, childhood memory that I was unwilling to let go of. Certainly that is a factor. However, the magic has never faded. I've read them all so many times that I've memorized them. I've memorized them so thoroughly that I've told them as bed time stories to children that I've done baby sitting for. Children who have loved the stories and begged to go to bed early so that they could hear MORE about Diggory and Polly or Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Susan or more about Shasta and Avaris and so on and so forth. Little did I know that this would be the series that would transform me into a devoted booknerd. At the age of 12, I managed to fly through each novel because they were just so beautiful and fantastic. The perfect mix of magic, adventure, and biblical allusions captivated me from start to finish. By the time I read The Last Battle, I was already a hardcore fanboy. My favorite part of this story was the involvement of the new character Eustace. Even though he was portrayed negatively at first it was interesting viewing how he slowly changed. The dragon scene was enjoyable to me. I am not a big fan of all the other scenes, they weren’t bad, but just not mind blowing. Like most non-vegetarians, Lewis views eating of meat as appropriate when the meat is that of a non- rational, nonthinking creature; eating a being who can speak is cannibalism, no matter what that being looks like. Whether or not one regards that as a significant distinction, or how significant it's seen as being, is a matter of opinion; but it is a genuine distinction between humans and, for instance, cattle.Given that this book was published in 1954, it's possible to forgive the cultural insensitivity, but it's sad that children around the world still uncritically read such racist material. This series will always hold a special place in my heart. I encourage you to read it, even if you think you're too old for it! All seven tales in The Chronicles of Narnia are bound together, with full-colour illustrations, in one magnificent hardcover volume with a personal introduction by Douglas Gresham, stepson of C. S. Lewis.