Book Reviews: Once upon a Wardrobe; The Mirror Visitor Quartet
Once upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan (Harper Muse, 2021)
If you read Patti Callahan’s previous novel, Becoming Mrs. Lewis, you know that she displayed a knack for getting inside the life of C.S. Lewis and those around him, and shaping the familiar facts into a touching new story. She does it again in her new novel, but from a very different perspective. Here, a (fictional) student at Oxford, Megs Devonshire, seeks out Lewis with an urgent request. Her little brother, George, is gravely ill. He’s found comfort and hope in Lewis’s stories, and he desperately wants to know where Narnia came from.
But there are no easy answers to his question. To help explain Narnia, Lewis has to tell Megs stories from his own life, and through those stories she starts to understand a great deal more than just the origin of his children’s books.
George and Megs are sweet and likable characters, and I enjoyed spending time with them, even if Megs seemed to have a lot more trouble getting a handle on Lewis’s stories than any rational adult should. But as a physics student, she’s always found all the answers she needs in math and science. So it makes sense that the realm of story is, so to speak, a closed book to her, until a patient master storyteller begins to open it for her.
Both for fans of Lewis and those new to him, Once upon a Wardrobe is a poignant reminder of the power of both stories and friendship in the most difficult times. It’s a warm cozy sweater of a book, well-suited for autumn or winter reading.
The Mirror Visitor Quartet by Christelle Dabos, translated by Hildegarde Serle
(English editions Europa Editions)
Book #1 in the series: A Winter’s Promise (English edition 2018)
I don’t quite know how to describe the Mirror Visitor series. Every time I try to formulate a description in my mind, I come up short. Let’s try this: It’s French Young Adult (but with actual adult characters instead of teens) metaphysical romantic fantasy.
That clears it all up, right?
I truly didn’t know what I was in for the day I pulled A Winter’s Promise off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, compelled by its cover. (That old saying about not judging a book by its cover? Complete nonsense. Some of the best books I’ve ever read are books I picked up because I liked their covers.)
That first book starts off with some pretty standard tropes, not to say clichés: We have a Plucky Young Heroine with Supernatural Powers, about to be Forced into an Arranged Marriage, with a Damaged and Brooding Love Interest. But (surprise!) Not All Is As It Seems—there’s an unusual reason for the marriage, and things are about to get crazy for our heroine, Ophelia, and for everyone and everything around her.
Though Christelle Dabos isn’t afraid to throw tropes at us, darned if she doesn’t somehow manage to make them interesting. And though she doesn’t tend to go very deep with her characterizations, many of her characters are downright fascinating. That’s partly because she sets them in a unique universe, filled with floating islands called arks, which were formed when a mysterious event called the Rupture broke the world apart. Over the course of four books, Ophelia uses all her wits, her powers, and her relationships with a variety of odd people—including Thorn, that previously mentioned love interest—to search for the entities behind the breaking up of the world, and to find a way to keep the arks from being destroyed completely.
I’ve just finished the fourth and final book, The Storm of Echoes (not pictured above), a massive tome that offered some solutions to the series’ myriad mysteries, but also left behind a number of questions and frustrations. For some time I had been wondering exactly what the religious angle of the series was meant to be—it seemed like there might be a “debunk and destroy God” thing going on, but in the end (mild spoiler alert), it was more of a “don’t try to make yourself out to be God” idea, which I can get behind. Other aspects of the ending were decidedly less satisfying, though the book still managed to end on a note of hope. (But I could really, REALLY use a fifth book to tie up a few pressing matters. Or maybe some good fanfiction.)
So, how to sum up the Mirror Visitor Quartet? It’s a little bit Harry Potter, a little bit Alice in Wonderland, perhaps a little bit 2001: A Space Odyssey (and for a while I feared it was going to be a little bit His Dark Materials as well, but in the end, it wasn’t really.) It veers back and forth between court intrigue and quest narrative. It’s part steampunk and part psychedelic. It’s sometimes startling, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and sometimes just plain bizarre. It’s a wild ride, but nearly always an entertaining one.
(Cover images copyright Harper Muse and Gallimard Jeune, respectively. I obtained an advance copy of Once upon a Wardrobe via NetGalley. Full disclosure: Patti Callahan, author of Once upon a Wardrobe, endorsed my book Dorothy and Jack.)
Book Links
Once upon a Wardrobe on Amazon
Once upon a Wardrobe on Bookshop
A Winter’s Promise on Amazon
A Winter’s Promise on Bookshop
Other Links
I’m back on the Great Books podcast again, this time to talk about Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise! Go here to listen.