Title: The Magician's Nephew
Author: C.S. Lewis
Series: The Chronicles of Narnia, book 1
Age Category: Middle Grade
Published by: May, 1955
Pages: 221p.
Genre: Epic fantasy
About The Magician's Nephew
Digory lives next to Polly in London, they spend the summer together. Polly has found that in the attics of all the row houses their row are connected. They decided to go exploring but ended up in Digory's Uncle Andrew's forbidden study.
From there they get thrown into the world of magic, into a parallel world, where they find a witch, they can't seem to shake, which chases them to Narnia.
My thoughts on The Magician's Nephew
This story is now over 60 years old and it feels like it was recently written. It is the way it was written that makes it seem ageless. This is the beginning of Narnia, in the literal sense as it is the story of how Narnia came to be. It also answers the question about how the connection between our world and Narnia was formed.
I am a sucker for origin stories, it was something I was not so aware of, but now that I am thinking about it I do like it. I have never heard anybody talk about this one, usually, everybody starts with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Even Goodreads believes that it should be read as a sixth book. I must disagree, I don't see any harm in reading this first, and I think it was supposed to be written as the first book in the series, as at the end it hints at The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
This book is intended as a children's book, and it is written in that way, but it also has some very mature, and very dark humor. I would suggest this for kids from 10 up not earlier, to be honest. The language is still very understandable, even for kids it will be easy to follow. I think I like that the most about this, it is so accessible in many ways.
On the one hand, it is a children's adventure story, on the other hand, it has some lessons in there as well. Think of you should obey your parents/elders, if you behave badly you will suffer the consequences etc. Also lots of child's play, like wanting to explore the other worlds, ringing the bell, and planting a toffee tree. These kinds of moments you see that it was intended for a young audience, however, it does not take anything away from the enjoyment of reading it.
I very much enjoyed this story, it feels like a fairytale, and I think this time around I will continue reading the rest of the series as well.
Rating The Magician's Nephew
I had a lovely time with this story, a lot of unanswered questions that I had after seeing the movies got answered here, and this is only the start of the adventures in Narnia, can't wait to read more about this world, as it is fast and rich in it's history, even when this was the very beginning of the history. It is a very special kind of story, one that will always stick to me. Therefore this story gets 4 cats!
The Witchy Rating of The Magician's Nephew
Since this is my first post on the blog, hi everybody, so glad that you found my little corner on the the internet. I am also going to introduce to you my rating system for Witchy books, as next to my normal rating mentioned above, I wanted to rate the truly Witchy books on their witchyness as well.
So here we go, in this case, the witch is part of the story, however, it is not the main character of the book. We are dealing with the evil kind of witch that wants to destroy or conquer worlds. The heroes Polly and Digory in this story do everything in their power to prevent the witch from succeeding. It is a classic kind of witch-like we see in fairy tales such as Hans and Gretel or Snow White.
I am rating this book on Witchyness of 3 cauldrons it had some interesting spell casting, but the witch was not the main character of the book.
