"The Silver Chair" by C. S. Lewis

If you assemble the Silver Chair, the Bronze Bow, and the Golden Compass, the ultimate power will be yours: Platinum, Alaska.

(I'm joking. Platinum, Alaska is actually a real town, though; as of 2020, it was inhabited by a whopping 55 people.)

For being the book's namesake, the Silver Chair is actually not in very much of the book. It appears in like one scene.

This book introduces Jill Pole, who's also in The Last Battle. I think she's the first female character to have POV for a majority of a book; there were bits from Susan's, Lucy's, and Aravis's POVs in the others, but it was mostly the guys.

Does anybody know if C. S. Lewis ever said what happens if you dig to the bottom of Narnia? We know from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that it's flat, but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever says how far down it goes. There's the Land of Bism mentioned here, which is supposedly the underground of the underground, but what if they went down further? Would they find even more underground kingdoms--is it underground kingdoms all the way down? Does it eventually just start being infinite solid rock? Do you fall out the bottom if you go too far? Does Aslan show up and tell you to knock it off?

I don't know, and I don't know if anybody else does, either.

This was one of my least favorite Narnia books when I was younger. I think that's partially because it's relatively unlike the others in both plot and tone, partially because it's harder than the others to take as a single narrative, and partially my own fault.

Basically, a short way into the book, I decided I wanted to know how it was going to end, so I flipped to the last page and read that. Except if you don't have the context from the rest of the book, the last page will make approximately zero sense, and I got very confused. That sense of confusion then lasted for pretty much my entire initial readthrough.

(The moral of the story: don't read the last page first, it won't make any sense.)

I think this is one of the most mature of the Narnia books. There's not any inappropriate content or anything, but it just has older vibes. I don't know if anyone else gets that out of it, but I do.

Oh, and I should mention Puddleglum! He's extremely dour, but also hilarious, and he's one of my favorite characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and some child abuse. It could be a reasonably good videogame in sort of the style of the newer Zelda releases.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has a lot of allegorical-ish elements, but I can't for the life of me figure out whether it is one, and if so, what for.)