Like all journey stories, some parts will be familiar and some will not. Most Narnia fans will be able to relate to Miller’s account of how the Chronicles of Narnia changed the way she looked at the world. They will identify with Miller’s deep desire to be Lucy, “that rare creation, a character who is good without being a prig or a bore.”
But these are side trips, not the main path in a book which promises to reclaim Narnia “for the rest of us,” this meaning readers who, like Miller, loved Narnia as young people but then felt “tricked, cheated, and betrayed” after they discovered that many Narnian themes mirrored themes found in Christianity.
Anyone not belonging to this “rest of us” group may find it hard to understand why this discovery produced so much anger and bitterness in Miller. Although she devotes most of her book to describing her rocky relationship with the Narnia books, she is never able to articulate exactly why learning that they represent C. S. Lewis’s attempt to put his most foundational beliefs into story form “horrified” her.
Would she have felt so horrified had she discovered Lewis was a Buddhist?