You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.

March 2024 thoughts: This is a very classically and biblically aware story & I love it. I love the pacing of the Narnia books, but this one's particularly notable: kids on train platform -> immediately in Narnia -> meet Trumpkin -> jump to Caspian story. Then the girls spend the rest of the novel romping around with Bacchus (whose presence I still don't quite get. I just read the Bacchae and good sir, what do you mean they are having a Romp? why??). 4.5 stars.

June 2022: I enjoyed listening to this again! It's quite a strange story. Despite its title, the Pevensies don't actually meet Caspian until almost 80% of the way through the book. Bacchus and Silenus show up for a random dancing scene with grapes, a bunch of little boys get turned into pigs, and I (yet again) was left with questions about Narnian economy and history (for example, how has the language changed not at all in the past thousand or so years?).

And yet. There is Aslan, wild and gentle, stern and beautiful. There is Caspian, adorably young and naive and sweet. There is Trumpkin, loyal even when doubting. And there are the Pevensies, who love each other very dearly even when they argue, and learn from their mistakes, and are part child and part adult royalty (and that contrast is very well done).

I liked this more than LWW, and I'm excited to reread Dawn Treader.