In the meanwhile, my wife has been reading the kid The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. We're each picking books that we loved as kids, and while I actually totally missed out on Narnia -- never really found it until I was basically too old -- she has fond memories of at least the first few.
The problem, of course, is that we're both vaguely aware that at some point the series gets not just "problematic" but, like, didactically Christian. And like, just to be clear, as an adult I actually really like C.S. Lewis's explicitly religion writing -- I encountered Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters at the right age for them both to be formative influences on my thinking -- but, uh
we're Jewish. And there's probably A Line somewhere between "stories inspired by Christian values and beliefs" and "stories whose explicit message is 'you, the reader, should be Christian.'"
Anyway all of that is just the background for why I was on Wikipedia to read some plot summaries of the later books in the series, and in a moment of whiplash that I hope I have now recreated for you, read the opening sentence:
