My first experience with this book is my mom reading it to me and my siblings on long car rides. She read through the whole series over the years, and she has the best reading aloud voice lol.

I was surprised that I still quite enjoyed listening to the story. It is so whimsical and fun without feeling like there were no stakes. I liked that the story was a group of siblings. (It definitely made it easy to play pretend as the characters with my siblings when I was younger haha) I feel like there aren’t a lot of stories about groups of siblings, so it was fun to see realistic sibling dynamics. 

I appreciated Edmund’s character and his story arc throughout this book. He starts off as a jerk middle brother and grows into a hero by the end of the story. Aslan’s sacrifice for him is symbolic of Jesus’s sacrifice for humanity, and having a specific character represent this sinful nature in people illustrated the point really well. 

Lucy is fun too, and a clever way of introducing the world of Narnia to the reader. Her friendship with Mr. Tumnus is cute as well. 

Peter and Susan don’t stand out quite as much to me, Peter feels a bit like a generic hero (which may be kind of the point to be fair) and Susan gets hardly any characterization at all. 

I was a little put off by the gender roles, especially at the beaver’s house, as well as Aslan’s implication that women should stay away from the battlefield. I thought about taking off a star on the rating. (I took off a star on Peter Pan because I just couldn’t get past all the racism and sexism in that book despite how wonderful it was.) However, for its time I believe the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was probably quite forward. Both Susan and Lucy get real weapons despite the instructions to stay away from the battle, and Lucy certainly does not stand in anyone’s shadow in this book. So while I would argue that it is mildly sexist from today’s perspective, I didn’t feel like it warranted a lower review given the time it was written in. 

I thought the fact that the children aged up completely to adulthood was a fascinating decision. If I remember correctly, there are stories during this Narnia adult period of their lives as well as more stories of them as children afterwards. It’s an interesting way of giving the writer more options on how to explore these characters! 

I’m excited to continue listening to more books in this series. I remember I didn’t like the ending to the whole series as a child, but I’ll try not to think about that now. (My siblings always had me play as Susan)