Hey, everybody! Welcome back to “Through a New Wardrobe”, where we sit down and chat with some of today’s hottest writers who have been influenced by CS Lewis and the Land of Narnia. For today’s interview we sit down with our friend, author Sarah Arthur, and discuss her new book Once a Castle the second book in her Carrick Hall series.
NarniaFans: It’s great chatting with you again, Sarah. Catch our readers up on what you’ve been up to since we last spoke to you.
Sarah Arthur: Thanks for having me on Narnia Fans again! I’ve been writing feverishly, not only tackling revisions for Once a Castle leading up to its release on Feb. 11, 2025, but also drafting book 3, Once a Crown, which is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2026. It’s been a pretty grueling pace, but exciting, too.
NF: Can you give us a quick teaser for Once a Castle that will give us an idea of what we’re in for?
SA: You’re in for a propulsive, adventurous ride, I hope! Book 2 takes place a few years after the events of Once a Queen and features several of Frankie Addison’s younger siblings–Tilly (age 16), Jack (15), and Elspeth (12) – plus Arash Tabari (15), grandson of Iranian refugees, and a Ternivali teenager named Zahra. The adventure begins when Jack stumbles upon a sleeping giant in the hills above his English village (I mean, if there’s a Jack, there’s gotta be a giant, right?), and soon all five teens are tangled up in a crazy quest to rescue multiple worlds. Will they be able to bridge their differences and overcome their personal challenges in time to save the realms they love?
NF: In the Narnia books we learn that there were “chinks and chasms” all throughout our world and Narnia that would allow others to cross over, like the Telmarines. Did this idea have an influence on Once a Castle and Zahra traveling to our world?
SA: I’ve always enjoyed portal fantasies, including E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902) and The Magic World (1912)–which, not incidentally, C. S. Lewis read as a kid. I also love the magical realism of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse (1946), among others. There’s this sense that some larger purpose or story or pattern is playing out in the universe, and we have the fun of participating in it.
NF: I love that you explored the question, “What if a character from a fantasy world entered our world?” in greater depth. In Narnia, we only saw Jadis terrorizing England, and Caspian was only shown on Earth for a few brief moments to frighten some school bullies. Share with us your motivations for exploring what it would be like for a person such as Zahra, from a magical world, to explore our own?
SA: There’s something really compelling to me about the possibility of other worlds breaking in on this one–and vice versa. Maybe it’s my training in theology: I don’t know. But at heart it’s this idea that beyond the material world are spiritual realities that, if we could see them, would blow open our understanding of the universe, ourselves, our purpose here, etc. Those realities seem just beyond our waking consciousness, right around the corner, like we’ll stumble into them at any moment. Any story that captures this feeling is on my Favorites list.
NF: Mindra turning humans into animals reminded me a lot of Circe in Homer’s the Odyssey. Did Circe influence her at all? I know in Homer’s epic, her rationale was to turn people into animals that corresponded with their personality ( offering to turn Odysseus into a fox because of his wit, turning a sailor into a bore because he was a pig). What was Mindra’s rationale for the forms she chose for her victims?
SA: Oh man, I’d forgotten all about Circe! She’s the perfect precursor to Mindra. But actually, my main inspiration for Mindra’s ability to turn people into animals was a short story about Jack the Giant Killer from the 1918 collection English Fairy Tales. There are numerous stories about Jack in that book, but in this tale he meets an old man who warns:
“On the top of yonder high hill is an enchanted castle kept by a giant named Galligantua, who, by the help of a wicked old magician, inveigles many beautiful ladies and valiant knights into the castle, where they are transformed into all sorts of birds and beasts, yea, even into fishes and insects. There they live pitiably in confinement..”
– From English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel, 1918
Incidentally, my Wordsworth Classics paperback from 1994 doesn’t credit any author for the text of that collection, not even on the title or copyright pages; it only names Arthur Rackham as the illustrator. So for the longest time I thought the author or authors were anonymous. But then I found the original edition on Project Gutenberg, in the public domain, and was delighted to learn that the author was someone named Flora (if you’ve read Once a Queen, you know why that matters!).
Why Ms. Steel’s name was dropped from later editions remains a mystery, but I find it both curious and mildly unethical. Just because a literary work by a relatively unknown woman is now in the public domain doesn’t mean we’re free to erase her contribution. Thankfully, the updated edition currently available from Wordsworth has restored Flora’s name, and she’s been given her own bio among the classic authors they feature on their website.
SA: No.
NF: I was so delighted to discover that Frankie and Eva were now a couple! I have to admit that their entire relationship in Once a Queen reminded me a lot of the friendship between Calvin O’Keefe and Meg Murry in L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and thus I was happy to see, as L’Engle’s series progressed, that they ended up together. As a fan of L’Engle yourself, how much would you say that Meg and Charles influenced Eva and Frankie and their relationship?
SA: Madeleine L’Engle’s influence is never far away in my writing. She loved to create these large families with lots of siblings and several generations under one roof. It’s interesting, because she herself was an only child–and a lonely child. It wasn’t until she was a mother and grandmother that she experienced the equivalent of Meg’s busy farmhouse–which is based on Madeleine’s own farmhouse, Crosswicks, in Goshen CT, where several generations of her family still live today. So, to answer your question, yes: I suppose I was influenced by Meg and Calvin in my depiction of Eva and Frankie’s friendship blossoming into something more. But I also love Shasta and Aravis in C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy–who, “when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing [so] more conveniently.”
NF: On that note, I couldn’t help but notice that one key conversation between Frankie and Eva is only observed from a distance. We don’t actually get to hear their interaction. What was your reasoning behind this?
SA: For me since neither of them is given a POV in Once a Castle, that means we can only experience that moment through the eyes of one of our other main characters. But even from a distance we know exactly what’s happening, by the way observers are describing it; and likewise, because we know Eva so well from her first-person POV in book one, we can easily imagine her internal reaction and response.
NF: To be honest, for me, I was almost reminded of when Aslan and Edmund speak privately to each other in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was a moment just between the two of them, not for Peter, Susan, and Lucy to intrude, or for us, the readers to eavesdrop, making it all the more meaningful.
SA: Absolutely! It also allows us to imagine, “What if that were me?” and then let our minds unspool our preferred reel, or version, of how things might happen.
NF: Did characters like Aravis from The Horse and His Boy and Emeth in The Last Battle inspire Zahra and Arash at all?
SA: To some extent, yes. But along the way I’m also having a quiet argument with authors like Lewis and Tolkien about their generally negative depictions of “foreign” characters from Middle Eastern-esque cultures. Aravis and Emeth are only welcomed into Narnia’s inner circle by being morally exceptional among their (supposedly inherently) “immoral” people of origin. They are two out of thousands upon thousands. Unfortunately, many classic authors were heavily influenced by the European fairy tales they grew up with–stories that were forged during the Crusades, when politics dictated that Middle Eastern characters be depicted in very negative ways. And those tropes and stereotypes still linger–including, alas, in Flora’s English Fairy Tales and other works. So my stories are both an homage to–and a lively argument with–those authors.
NF:It’s interesting you mention that argument ( the treatment of other races in Tolkien and Lewis).To that end I must ask, why do you think that Lewis and Tolkien’s works persist despite such content concerns? What, if anything, do they still have to teach us?
SA: I actually gave a lecture on this at the 2022 Northern Michigan CS Lewis Festival! It was titled “Not Today, Jack: How to Argue ( Lovingly) with Your Favorite Dead Author”, and you can listen to it here.
NF: Considering you wrote devotionals on both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to coincide with both of Peter Jackson’s trilogies, with the Netflix Narnia adaption is any chance we’ll see another Narnia themed devotional from you? Or considering that there’s a particular race of beings in your Carrick Hall series who appear to be inspired by the Oyarsa in Out of the Silent Planet, perhaps something on Lewis’ space trilogy?
SA: Publishing by own fiction is the focus right now.
NF: Considering all your work on L’Engle, I was surprised you weren’t contacted about doing a similar themed devotional on A Wrinkle in Time when that movie came out in 2018.
SA: Zondervan had already approached me about writing A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Biography of Madeleine L’Engle, which came out in August 2018. It included a forward by Madeleine’s granddaughter Charlotte and won an ECPA Top Shelf Award. So That was my focus at the time.
NF: What’s next for you after Once a Castle?
SA: I will be one of the keynote speakers for the annual Realm Makers Conference, July 18-20, 2025 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Realm Makers is a community of fantasy and science fiction writers, filmmakers, illustrators, agents, publishers, content creators, and more. And, of course, Book 3, in the Carrick Hall Novels, Once a Crown.
NF: Thanks again, so much for your time, Sarah! Once a Castle is available in Book stores now and is available for pre/order here, and please enjoy a sneak peak at Chapters 1-3, and look for our reveiw of Once a Castle coming soon!