Narnia Review: The Wardrobe That Started It All

The Portal Fantasy That Taught Us All to Check Our Closets

I was seven the first time I climbed into the back of a wardrobe and pushed through coats hoping to feel snow instead of wood paneling, and I think every kid who’s read this book has done the exact same thing. That’s the whole trick of Narnia. It doesn’t just tell you a fantasy world exists. It convinces you the door to it might be in your own house.

Four Kids, One War, and the Original Found Family

Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy get shipped off to a country house during the Blitz, which is already a gut-punch of a setup before a single fantastical thing happens. Lewis doesn’t waste time on angst about it either. These are matter-of-fact 1940s kids, a little stiff by modern dialogue standards, but they feel real in the way that matters: Susan is the cautious one, Peter takes charge because someone has to, Lucy is the believer nobody listens to at first, and Edmund is the one who gets it wrong in ways that actually cost something. Their sibling dynamic is the emotional engine of the whole book, and it’s a found-family story before found family was a trope anyone had named. You don’t need a prophecy to feel invested in whether these four kids make it out okay. You just need to have had a sibling who annoyed you and mattered to you in equal measure.

The Chosen One Framing, and Why It Still Works

Yes, there’s a prophecy. Yes, there are Kings and Queens destined by bloodline rather than earned by any character arc, which is exactly the kind of thing that would get dragged in a 2026 fantasy release. But Narnia gets a pass that newer books don’t, partly because it invented half the furniture modern fantasy still uses, and partly because Lewis is more interested in what the kids do with the responsibility than in the destiny itself. Aslan is the real center of gravity here, and however you feel about the religious allegory once you’re old enough to clock it, there’s no denying he’s one of the most quietly devastating characters in children’s literature. The scenes with him land with a weight that a lot of adult fantasy still can’t manage.

Where It Genuinely Shows Its Age

I’ll be honest because that’s the whole point of a review like this: the prose is simple, almost too simple in stretches, and there’s a briskness to the pacing that means some of the worldbuilding gets sketched rather than built. Mr. Tumnus and the Beavers are charming but thin. The girls get some genuinely dated treatment by the time you’re deep into the series, and Susan’s arc in later books is the kind of thing fandom has been side-eyeing for decades and rightly so. Taken purely as this book, though, none of that undercuts what it’s doing. It’s a children’s book, written with total sincerity, and it never condescends to its reader even when it’s being simple.

What Actually Sticks With You

It’s not the battle. It’s the snow, the lamppost, the smell of a wardrobe that shouldn’t smell like pine trees, and the ache of Edmund’s choices catching up to him. Lewis understood that wonder and consequence have to sit side by side or the wonder doesn’t mean anything, and that’s the lesson every cozy fantasy and portal story since has been trying to relearn.