Once Upon A Wardrobe

A few weeks ago, for the very first time, I read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I had never had the urge to pick up the series or watch the movies so, admittedly, I am quite late to the Narnia party. I decided to finally read this classic to prepare for this book, Patti Callahan's Once Upon A Wardrobe which references the classic and the life of author C.S Lewis. It's been quite popular on Bookstagram (where cool book nerds hang out on Instagram) so I thought I'd see what the fuss was about and bought a digital copy.

The story is told in two parts. The first follows 17-year-old Meg, a math student at Oxford and older sister of 8-year-old George whose love of Narnia helps to appease his increasingly ailing health. When George asks Meg to answer his question "Where did Narnia come from?", Meg approaches C.S Lewis with the intention of getting an answer to her sick brother's question. The second part is told in flashbacks to Lewis' childhood with his brother Warnie and how his imagination was stoked at an early age.

This was an interesting read that had heartfelt moments, but I never truly felt pulled into either story line. While I love Meg's devotion to her brother, she is logical, rigid and stubborn at times which comes in handy as she tries to find out about Narnia, but her need for hard facts about this fictional story and world was hard to believe. C.S Lewis' early life and how he came up with Narnia was interesting leaving me with an enjoyable book that didn't quite live up to its hype.

Heartwarming and charming in some respects, this is a light story with an interesting premise that will appeal to fans of C.S Lewis' work more than this new-to-Narnia reader. I strongly recommend reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe prior to this book due to the many references to Narnia and the characters within that classic story.

My Rating: 3.5 stars

Author: Patti Callahan

Genre: Historical Fiction

Type and Source: eBook - personal copy

Publisher: Harper Muse

First Published: October 19, 2021

Opening Line: George Henry Devonshire is only 

eight years old and he already knows the truth.

Book Description from GoodReads: From the bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis comes another beautiful story inspired by C. S. Lewis’s ability to change the world and captivate hearts—including those of a terminally ill boy and his logic-driven sister.

Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford with dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics.

But equations haven’t been able to solve her biggest problem: her brother George, whom she adores, has a failing heart. It has been failing for all eight years of his life. When George is given a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and begs her to find out where Narnia came from, there’s no way she can refuse.

And so Megs moves completely out of her comfort zone, imploring the author and famous tutor of English Literature to give her the answers her brother so desires. What she receives instead is more stories . . . stories of Jack Lewis’s life, which she takes home to George.

Meg keeps trying to impose her trusty logic on the stories, but she slowly comes to realize that lists never answer the biggest questions. The gift she thought she was giving George turns out to be the one he was giving her: hope.