"The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis

This review is part of my first completed quest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

Basically, the puzzle that started it all has two of the Narnia books on it: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy. Why whoever assembled it picked those two out of the list, I don't know. (Although, if I were assembling that puzzle and had to pick two Narnia books, I'd probably pick either this or Prince Caspian for the second one.)

This is the one set in Calormen. Now I can stop mentioning it every review.

Basically, a Calormene slave boy (named Shasta, who's actually from some nebulous somewhere else; he's not Calormene by birth) meets a talking horse from Narnia and decides to run away to Narnia rather than get sold to a jerkface. Along the way, he meets a Calormene noble girl (named Aravis) and her talking horse from Narnia, who's also currently running away to Narnia. So they run away to Narnia.

Along the way, Shasta runs into some of the Pevensies, and Aravis runs into the absolute ditziest character I think I've ever seen in fiction: Lasaraleen Tarkheena, who's somewhat irritating but also hilarious. Then they find out that |the Calormene prince Radabash is going to sneak attack Narnia and Archenland because he has a crush on Susan who doesn't like him back (because he's a total jerk), and they rush to get there before the invading army so they can warn everyone about it|.

Oh, and |Shasta is actually a long-lost prince of Archenland|.

I'm not entirely sure how old anyone is in this, but I don't think they're twelve.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I think it could be quite a good videogame, actually; it has a mostly linear plot and a clear sense of direction, which lends itself to a linear videogame (thus removing the problem I've seen with making less linear books into imaginary videogames: the dilemma of either "railroad the player into retracing the steps the original protagonist took through the story" or "make it truly open-world, necessitating making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the book to fill out the game.") Honestly, this book would probably make a better videogame than most of the ones I've reviewed recently.

5 stars. This is probably the Narnia book I've read the most often, and I really do like it.

Favorite lines:

    People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

    Page 44.

    "I say, is there anything to drink?"

    "No, I drank it," said Shasta.

    Page 80. This is Prince Cor of Archenland returning to the apartments housing the Narnians, after a long day of getting into fights and having Shasta mistaken for him. (Hence why Shasta is also there; the Pevensies picked him up thinking he was Cor.)

    "And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There."

    Page 99. This is Lasaraleen, the total ditz character I mentioned earlier, threatening her servants into not revealing Aravis's escape.

    "Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!"

    "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" asked Corin.

    Pages 215-216. (For context, Rabadash, who's saying this, is threatening everyone with the bolt of Tash. Which falls from above. He also, in the preceding battle, tried to jump down on someone and ended up getting his chainmail shirt stuck on a hook, leaving him hanging there looking silly and yelling at everyone.)

    Aravis and Cor prepared themselves to be bored.

    Page 221. I laughed so hard over that phrasing.

(Endnote: I have taken a few artistic liberties with the punctuation of the favorite lines. This is for readability and so I can truncate the line into the actual favorite part, rather than having the favorite bit and then everything around it.)