The Horse and His Boy (1954)

Coming back to this series, I'm surprised by how much I really like it. "The Horse and His Boy" is a little parable which doesn't really connect with the rest of the Narnia series, but there's something about the imagery of this duo and their cross-country travels that really appealed to me as a child. I think it's rather lovely, really. ( )

Lovely, as is all of Narnia! This is probably my least favorite of the seven, but I obviously liked it enough, as I gave it four stars. ;) ( )

The third tale (chronologically) in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and not a favorite. I found myself extremely uncomfortable reading about a place where the bad guys are dark-skinned Muslim stand-ins, and the good guys are blonde, blue-eyed Aryans Narnians. It's probably not something I would have bumped on if I had read these when I was a child, but now, in the increasingly partisan, paranoid, intolerant, hate-filled world we have made for ourselves, it sat badly indeed.

The story itself, subtracting the distasteful ethno-religious elements, was slight but fine. A slave boy runs away from his master, aided and abetted by a talking horse who was himself captured from Narnia and wants to return home. Along the way, horse and boy team up with a young girl fleeing a forced marriage and her own talking horse. Hwin the lady horse was my favorite character by far. I can only imagine how completely over the moon I would have been to read this in fifth grade, when I was at the height of my "horse crazy" phase! ( )

The Chronicles of Narnia really define my childhood in so many ways. I remember being read to at night before bed as my parents made their way through each of these books and my imagination went running rampant. I absolutely adored each one of these stories, the children and their tumbles into Narnia, the lessons that they learned from Aslan and his people, and the greater implications it had on me as a reader and human being. I adore British literature, and especially children's British literature from the master, C.S. Lewis! ( )

I did not know this story at all and absolutely loved it! I wish this one had been made into a movie too! ( )