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mattdavenport 's review for:
The Horse and His Boy
by C.S. Lewis
This was by far the worst Narnia book so far, and it brought to an extreme many of the problems that plague the series as a whole. Biggest of all, there is some pretty overt racism in this book. The bad guys are from what is obviously an Arab-equivalent country, and every male character of that descent in the story is greedy, moral-less, and violent. This is put in constant contrast to the all-white Narnians, who are seamlessly all honorable and Aslan's chosen people. There's even a line about post-slavery work ethic that boggled my mind in the probable parallel Lewis was making to mid-50s America. Additionally, the story continues to promote sexism and treats any semi-strong female character as a huge exception to the norm.
Those things are enough to warrant a 1-star review, but to make matters even worse, the story was just boring. Aslan's parts were entertaining as always, but again a lot of the important parts of the plot were explained post-occurrence in excruciatingly long detail, and in the most meandering of ways in an attempt to make the conversations more realistic. That's cool, but no reader really wants a page long side-track of irrelevant detail as the narrator tries to get to his/her points (and this happens repeatedly). None of the characters were particularly intriguing, they were all very stereotypical and shallow, and the climax of the book lacked any real intrigue as, similar to "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the actually action sequence isn't seen on screen, it's just narrated by bystanders during or after.
Overall, this was a pretty mind-numbing waste of time to read. I'm hoping "The Magician's Nephew" (which seems to be some people's favorite) and "The Last Battle" (the grand conclusion to the series) make themselves worth the time.
Those things are enough to warrant a 1-star review, but to make matters even worse, the story was just boring. Aslan's parts were entertaining as always, but again a lot of the important parts of the plot were explained post-occurrence in excruciatingly long detail, and in the most meandering of ways in an attempt to make the conversations more realistic. That's cool, but no reader really wants a page long side-track of irrelevant detail as the narrator tries to get to his/her points (and this happens repeatedly). None of the characters were particularly intriguing, they were all very stereotypical and shallow, and the climax of the book lacked any real intrigue as, similar to "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the actually action sequence isn't seen on screen, it's just narrated by bystanders during or after.
Overall, this was a pretty mind-numbing waste of time to read. I'm hoping "The Magician's Nephew" (which seems to be some people's favorite) and "The Last Battle" (the grand conclusion to the series) make themselves worth the time.