Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan Henry

“The fantastic and the imaginative aren’t escapism . . . Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning. . . It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”

-Once Upon a Wardrobe

Once Upon a Wardrobe is a stunningly gorgeous novel that tells the story of the early life of C.S. Lewis. Megs is a student at Oxford studying mathematics. She travels home often to spend time with her younger brother George, who is very ill and isn’t expected to live much longer due to a heart condition. When George discovers the recently published novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he has the question, “Where did Narnia come from?”

Megs is so desperate to answer her brother’s question, that she seeks out C.S. Lewis (Jack) at his home at Oxford in the hopes that she can speak with him and get an answer for her brother. Jack decides to give Megs an answer to her question, but not in the way she anticipated. Instead, she returns multiple times over the course of a few weeks to hear about his early childhood and that of his brother Warnie’s as well. And while Megs tries so hard to understand, her mathematically driven and logical mind can’t always make sense of what Jack is trying to tell her.

Until of course, she does.

This book is a love letter to stories, about what makes them and why they are so important. It is a hard book not to fall into, not to love entirely. It was brimming with emotions because on the whole we are watching George become this brilliant young lad while knowing that he may not live to the end of the book. The story of Megs and George is fiction, but it’s as real as a family of siblings stumbling through a magical wardrobe and stepping into another world.

I also did not know much about the early life of C.S. Lewis. This was an eye opening and transformative experience, reading about the man who would become such a beloved and respected writer. I know the author drew upon C.S. Lewis’ own account of his early life, and I both want to read more of his work as well as the works about him. I’ve only read the first few Narnia books, but I absolutely loved them. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child and dying to know what Turkish delight tasted like (I remember not loving it as an adult when I did have the chance to try it). But this novel made me want to step back into Narnia, and I hope to at some point start over and read it all the way through. I was also magically entranced by Patti Callahan Henry’s writing style, and I am very eager to read another of her novels, Becoming Mrs. Lewis which tells the story of how C.S. Lewis met and fell in love with his wife.

This novel is a story for book lovers everywhere. It will tug at your heartstrings and bring you somewhere else, at least for a little while. And the best books do that, don’t they?