I've always wanted to find a book that dealt with the question of how to cope after leaving a fantasy world. Narnia felt insufficient, brushing over any trauma the Pevensies might have experienced in favor of the excitement of their new adventures (& at least temporarily abandoning Susan after she turned away); the Gateway Chronicles tied everything up neatly with a family that believed their children's story and happy endings for everyone in both worlds. I really hoped this one would be different, but in the end, it wasn't.

However. There were a LOT of good things, and until the final chapters I was ready to give this book very high praise. It deals with difficult topics: depression, self-harm, PTSD, loss of a family member. One of the POV characters is very clearly ignoring a lot of her problems, and watching her slide into further delusion and self-sabotage was terrifying and very well-done. The sisterly relationship was good. Honestly, I really appreciated the unflinchingly honest look at the darker sides of obsession with magical worlds (something that can affect the modern fantasy reader nearly as much as the worldhopper, in my opinion).

Spoiler

I am incredibly dissatisfied with the conclusion, in which the character who has been self-harming and suicidal because of her love for the magical world she left gets to go back to that world instead of learning to live in her own, and her sister is left to tell her family the truth (or not). All the harm she wreaked on her friends & loved ones by leaving them behind and being considered dead or lost for months is disregarded because now, she's happy. The other sister's feelings of responsibility for her sister's depression, meanwhile, are validated, and it seems the only way to alleviate her guilt is to let her sister remain in the other world.

No. No! No matter how beautiful a fantasy world may be, its point is to make us love our own more, to make us want to see the beauty in it and to change it for the better. As Aslan says, the Pevensies are to go back to their own world and know him by another name, not to stay in Narnia forever. They are not meant for that world. And furthermore, if someone around you is struggling with depression or self-harm, it is not your fault. You can try to help them but their choices and their struggles are theirs and not yours. The character here is so fixated on what might have happened (a thing Aslan, coincidentally, says we are not to know) that she is unable to understand that she must do the right thing now, since she can't change it.

The fictional world was fine. It felt like the author wanted to write about Narnia but couldn't, so made up a very Narnia-like world without the Christianity, and by the end of the story I wanted to bang all the characters over the head with a Bible. I liked the poetry scattered throughout the work (Tennyson, especially), and the romances were sweet, and the bits about learning to love and live in the real world. But the idea that one sister did not need to do so, that she was simply made to live in a fantasy realm, rang very hollow.

Piranesi is a much better take on the right relation of man to fantasy, and N.D. Wilson's novels a much healthier way to give children a love for the magic of their own world. This book might be a good read for adults who like Narnia, but don't expect to agree with the author. Content warning for graphic depictions of violence and corpses & an honest portrayal of self-harm and depression.