Four children are sent out of London during the war to stay in a big house in the country. The youngest hides in a wardrobe during a game and comes out the other side into a snowbound forest that has been held in winter for a hundred years. Published 1950.
Why it earns read-aloud time
Because Lewis wrote it out loud.
He talks straight to the listener. He says things like "I have no idea what he meant by that" and "you will find out later." That is a grown-up sitting in a chair telling a story, not a novel being performed, and children respond to it differently. The narrator is on their side of the room.
The other thing is the opening. A wardrobe in a spare room, coats, mothballs, and then snow on the back of your neck. It is one of the great first thirty pages in children's writing, and it works even on a child who has already seen a film of it, because the film cannot do the smell of the coats.
The child it lands with
The one who wants to be somewhere else. This is the book for a kid stuck in a house they did not choose, in a season that will not end, which around here is roughly February.
Also the youngest of several, because Lucy is right and nobody believes her for a hundred pages, and every younger sibling has lived that.
One place to stop and talk
Edmund and the Turkish Delight. He eats an enchanted candy, and afterwards he wants more of it more than he wants anything else, including his family.
Stop and ask your child why he goes back to her the second time, when he already knows. Not what he should have done. Why he does it. That is the most useful conversation in the book and children get somewhere honest with it.
What to know going in
Say this part plainly, because families come to this book from opposite directions and both deserve a straight answer.
The story carries a religious allegory and Lewis meant it to. Aslan's death on the Stone Table and what follows map onto a Christian story deliberately. Some families choose the book precisely for that. Others would rather it were not there. It is there either way, and it is not preached: a child who does not know the reference reads it as a story about a lion who is killed and comes back, and it works completely on those terms.
Beyond that: the White Witch is genuinely frightening, there is a scene where Aslan is bound and shaved and killed that upsets a lot of eight-year-olds, and the framing is wartime evacuation, meaning children sent away from their parents. Some kids find that last part more unsettling than the witch.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Aaron Slater and the Sneaky Snake: Who Gets to Decide
Aaron Slater and the Sneaky Snake: The Questioneers Chapter Book #6 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child.
