Lucas Stoffel

Book Review: The Magician's Nephew is the Narnia book I wish more people started with. C.S. Lewis wrote it sixth in the series but it is the chronological prologue — the story of how the world of Narnia came to exist, and how the White Witch got there, and why there is a lamppost in the middle of a forest. Greta Gerwig's Netflix adaptation, coming late 2026, is reportedly starting the movie franchise here rather than with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That is the corr

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.

The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, and everything changes. Where The Golden Compass was Lyra's book — fierce, adventurous, set in a single extraordinary world — The Subtle Knife is about the spaces between worlds, and the boy who can cut through them. Book Review.

Philip Pullman wrote a children's book where the villains are the Church, the weapon is truth, and the hero is an eleven-year-old girl who lies better than anyone in literature. The Golden Compass is the most subversive, most ambitious, and most beautifully written fantasy novel for young readers ever published, and I will fight about this.

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it. Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, whi