The Magician’s Nephew [Book Review]

Book Title: The Magician’s Nephew

Author: C.S. Lewis

Book Saga: The Chronicles of Narnia (Chronological Order) #1

Genres: Fantasy. Classics. Children. Young Adult (Maybe). A bit Christian. Fiction.

Book Description: The secret passage to the house next door leads to a fascinating adventure. Narnia… where the woods are thick and cool, where Talking Beasts are called to life… a new world where the adventure begins.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hello, dearies! Welcome to my first ever C.S. Lewis book review. 😮

That’s right I had never read The Chronicles of Narnia or any book by this author. But I decided this year that it was time, it had gone long enough, and frankly, I opened the book and started reading without giving it too much thought.

And that was eye-opening for me. But first let me tell my first impressions of reading The Magician’s Nephew, which was not what I was expecting in many ways.

The Magician’s Nephew Thoughts

• Me starting The Magician’s Nephew: okay, let’s do it.
• Alright this book is kind of strange. When is Narnia coming in?
• Oh, I don’t know if I liked this book.
• Me at 40% in. Wow, other worlds, okay.
• Me at 55%: when did I reach half the book?
• Me at 80%: I’m almost done, amazing. And I’m still reading it.
• 80-100%: it took me like a week to finish this part, but I finally managed it.

To be fair, the book only has about 200 pages, so that’s on me for taking longer than I normally do with essentially a short book, compared to those that are 300 or 600 pages long, and I have read in week.

After finishing the Book

Alright, be prepared for spoilers if you haven’t read this book or The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or watched that movie, or any of the movies, or if you don’t know anything about this world.

That said, I shall speak like you know or want to know.

Now, The Magician’s Nephew, is the book about how Narnia started, literally, the fact that Aslan is basically God, how The Witch came to be, and how there are other worlds, but you can’t really into those anymore because there is no more magic. Oh, and about the fact that before, on Earth, there were Fairy godmothers. Yep, like the one from Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella.

That was a bit, tiny bit, of a tidbit, thrown in to make you keep reading.

After that, you get to follow these two kind of annoying kids around as they jump from world to world, bring in evil people, but in the end they sort of made themselves useful, and you get to see how Narnia was made, why the wardrobes works in the next book, and how come there is a random lamppost when you go into Narnia, lol. That was fun to see, of course, I have watch The Chronicles of Narnia a bunch of time by now, so reading this book I could figure out some things of what was happening.

If you haven’t read any of it, then you might be a bit more into it, from the perspective of discovering a new world and magic; however, it could get a bit confusing in the way it was written because the author did write it as if you already about Aslan and Narnia, keep that in mind if you are new.

I don’t know how TL, TW, and TW is written if it is the same style, but if it is then that’s just how CS Lewis wrote, and it was a bit all over the place to be honest. I didn’t think I had so much to say about this book, but there it is. I can only imagine what it’d be like when I read the others. 😸

Why I decided to go with the Chronological Order?

I always go with Chronological order if they are available and if I haven’t read a book in a saga, I like going in order of years and happenings, and I had decided way before starting the book for real that I would read The Chronicles of Narnia is this order, but when I was about to start this one, I gave it a serious research (not so serious), though I did go look up what was the deal with it.

And after considering both sides that people take on this, and what Lewis family has said, and what he said before about the books, I decided that this order was right for me. I knew I would probably not be as into TMN if I would read it as book 6 because honestly, what happens in it, is not like it tells a bunch of backstories, it is mostly, literally, before TL,TW, and TW. If you want to know how or what happened before Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy stumbled into Narnia then this book is the right call.

If not, then go with the Publication Order. I cannot make that decision for you, and there is no right way, despite what people will say online. The author did say that when he wrote the first book TLTWTW, he didn’t know the others would come, and that the order didn’t matter much, so if he decided to tie them all up with TMN, that sounds like Chronological is good enough to me.

In any case, you should read the comments of the author or what happens in the book description before making a final decision, what is your way of reading a book saga? That’s the better question, there are two ways with this one, and we can choose between the two.

Or a third option, read a summary of this book, lol.

That’s all from me, dearies, thank you for stopping by the blog and reading once again a rambling and ranting about a book that it is essentially a sequel and a short novel to fill in the story of how The Chronicles of Narnia started.

Let me know if you have read it, or are planning on reading it.

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Happy reading! 🦁

Update March 2026

The podcast for this review is available now, dearies. Check it out below:

About the Upcoming Movie

There is a new Narnia movie coming up, I only found out recently. Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is scheduled to be released in theatres in a few months, on November 26 of this year, 2026. This movie, I didn’t know that it was happening, but I am actually excited to go and watch it. It will star Emma Mackey as Jadis the White Witch, David McKenna as Digory Kirke, and Beatrice Campbell as Polly Plummer.