The Chronicles of Narnia – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a sea adventure for 8 year olds that starts with a painting on a bedroom wall.

What happens

Eustace Clarence Scrubb is the sort of cousin you dread. He likes beetles if they are dead and pinned to a card, and books if they have pictures of grain elevators in them. He has no friends. He is quite pleased that Edmund and Lucy are coming to stay, because giving people a bad time is easier on home ground.

The three of them end up in the little back room, looking at a picture Aunt Alberta hates. A ship with one purple sail and a gilded dragon's head, running fast on a blue wave.

Then the waves start moving.

Wind comes out of the frame. So does the smell of salt. So, a moment later, does the sea, and all three children are in it, being hauled up the side of a real ship by real sailors.

This is the fifth Narnia book and Edmund and Lucy have been here before. Eustace has not. Watching him work out that the talking Mouse in the gold circlet is not a performing animal, and that this Mouse takes offence, is one of the great pleasures of the opening.

Reepicheep is worth the whole book on his own. Two feet tall, a sword nearly as long as his tail, and no sense of proportion at all about his own honour. He wants to sail to the eastern end of the world and see what is there.

King Caspian wants something sadder and simpler. Seven friends of the old king were packed off east years ago by Caspian's uncle, to get them out of the way, and Caspian has sworn to learn what became of them.

So the ship keeps going, and the islands get stranger.

One thing to know before you start. At the Lone Islands the whole party is grabbed by slave traders, roped together and taken to market, and one of the children is bought in front of the others while Lucy cries. Lewis keeps it brisk and nobody is hurt. Even so, children are tied up and priced like livestock, and some readers will feel that more than others.

For most, the pull is the map. Every chapter is a new island and you genuinely cannot guess what is on it.

What to read next

If they want to know how Edmund and Lucy came to be kings in the first place, Caspian's own earlier adventure is in the library too. Four children are yanked off a railway platform mid-sentence and dropped in a wood, with no idea where they have landed.