The Horse and His Boy
Just finished The Horse And His Boy (as opposed to a boy and his dog) and I really really liked it. One of the things I was really excited to find out was how they were going to have another book, since the fist book ends with them actually getting old and living happily ever after. (Which was actually quite spooky when you think about it.) But having an almost completely unrelated story set in exactly the same time. Awesome. I also really liked the flavor that was in this book. He did a really good job of building a feeling of a foreign land by making it more like our own world than Narnia. The “norm” becomes talking animals and the abnormal is regular humans.
The one thing I don’t like is that the boy really was from the north. It would have been more powerful IMO if he were actually from the south and has simply become friends with the prince. They could have banded together on some jaunt or something. As it was the whole book smacked of racism and sexism, but the fact that the arab female was the most likable and complex character in the book made it much easier to wade through the fact that the entire war was men going around and picking unwilling brides for themselves.
The other thing I liked was how much this book opened up the world. Narnia is just one small country. I also loved the machinations of the King of Calormen in thinking about invading Narnia. He was smart enough to rule over that large a kingdom. He set up a plot with such good plausible deniability that even though it was heard by “spies” they were unable to leverage that against him. Nice.
Definitely my favorite book so far. They do seem to get better as they go along.