"Prince Caspian" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, book 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia, no matter what number it says on the cover.

Now that I'm doing the whole series, I should probably explain the thing about the reading order. Basically, there are two different schools of thought regarding the proper order to read the Narnia books in, and they are a matter of some debate.

The one most collections use is the internal chronological order, namely "The Magician's Nephew / The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / The Horse and His Boy / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Silver Chair / The Last Battle." There are several problems with that one, most notably that if you haven't read any of the other books, The Magician's Nephew is hard to understand and kind of boring.

The other one is the publication order, which goes in "2 4 5 3 6 1 7" or "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy / The Silver Chair / The Magician's Nephew / The Last Battle." That's the order people following the books for the first time would have read them in, it's the order in which Lewis wrote them, and while it doesn't get rid of the continuity errors it makes them less jarring. This one is the order I personally prefer, and the one I'll be doing this review series in.

(Wait, I just ended a sentence with a preposition! *cue screams of horror*)

Anyway, enough minutae. Time to talk about the actual book.

I'm not sure it's actually an allegory, unlike the first one. If you have any idea what (if anything) it's supposed to be allegorizing, please let me know, because I don't.

Here we are introduced to the Telmarines, who weren't originally in Narnia. They're actually pirates who came through a portal to Narnia "a long time ago", and yet somehow arrived in the 1300ish years between the first book and this one... time in Narnia is weird, man. We also have our first mention of the country of Calormen, which won't properly show up until The Horse and His Boy.

There's a bit in this where some side characters show up and attempt to summon the White Witch to get rid of the evil king. The character who introduces them uses the logic of "any port in a storm and we're losing pretty bad right now, plus she might not have been as bad as the legends make her out to be, right?", while the characters doing the summoning use the logic of "haha we're evil." They get smacked down pretty much instantly in the book, but in the movie version they partially succeed; I mostly mentioned this so I could point out how good a job the special effects people did at making that scene look intrinsically wrong.

You can see Lewis fleshing out the lore as you get farther along in the series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. There actually was a videogame of the movie of the book; it was rated T and apparently wasn't very good. I think it could be possible to make a good videogame of this, though I'm not sure who you'd play as (maybe a Lego The Hobbit-like system of swapping between characters?) and a fairly significant chunk of the book would probably have to be reduced to cutscenes.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like," said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.

    Page 144.

(Endnote: I can neither confirm nor deny that the title character is named after the Caspian Sea. Nothing I can find has a definitive answer.)