First Impressions

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Filia, aged 9, just finished reading The Last Battle a little while ago. She looked up at me and said, "I wonder what happened to Susan."

I asked her what she thought.

"I think she probably just lived a normal life."

I pointed out that she was probably really sad for a while. Filia agreed.

Then she started wondering if Susan really did remember Narnia, suggesting that maybe she hadn't forgotten forever and it was just a stage, and one day she would remember it again.

Comments

[rthstewart]

She is a very wise girl.

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She amazes me sometimes. I used to quote her often on Facebook, but I had to stop about six months ago because she told me I didn't have her permission to pass along her utterances to the multitudes. I feel okay about doing it here because only a few people read me, and I'm not using either her real name or mine.

More of her thoughts: "All in all, I don't find The Last Battle a very satisfactory book. I mean, it's all about grim things happening, and it says they have lots of adventures afterwards but doesn't tell anything about them, even vaguely. And it doesn't say what happens to Susan." She thinks there ought to be more stories about Susan. I suggested she write some.

[heliopausa]

Absolutely, re: writing them! :D

She sounds a wonderfully thoughtful, argumentative reader. ('argumentative' is a compliment!)

[transposable_element]

It's been fascinating watching her grow more sophisticated as a reader. After finishing tMN she said she wanted to go back and reread LWW. She didn't say why, but presumably she realized that it would read differently with tMN as background. We had been talking about "prequels" in relation to another series.

She doesn't like to write, though. I think it may mostly be a motor issue because she has a lot of ideas, but writing them down takes too long and she gets frustrated.

[edenfalling]

That problem is why I taught myself to touch-type around age ten -- I got so frustrated not being able to write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts!

(And yeah, LWW is a very different experience when read before MN and when read after MN, which is why I think reading Narnia in publication order is best. *grin*)