Also by this author: The Angel Orphan: Charlotte Mason Finds Her Way Home
Series: Tales of Boldness and Faith #2
Published by Moody Publishers on February 4, 2025
Genres: Children's
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Chronicles of Wonder tells the story of the imaginative boy born in Ireland who loved books and poetry and grew himself to be a famous teacher and writer. But before he penned The Space Trilogy or The Chronicles of Narnia, Clive Staples Lewis found friends in other stories, including tales from Beatrix Potter, The Wind and the Willows, Phantastes by George MacDonald, and The Pilgrim’s Progress.
In this fictionalized biography, author Leah Boden intertwines the life of Lewis—or as his friends knew him, “Jack”—with literary works that impacted him. From Shakespeare to his close friend Tolkien, each chapter takes you through the life of Jack and the works that steadied and guided him.
Readers travel through Jack’s boarding school days, The Great War, and his professorship at Oxford. They learn when Jack came to trust in Jesus and how he then became a voice for the Christian world. As each chapter unfolds, young readers are encouraged by the creativity, wisdom, and humility of Jack, while gaining an appreciation for the heart shaping power of books.
This book is the second in a new series of fictionalized biographies for children. Chronicles of Wonder covers the life of C. S. Lewis, highlighting the influence of books and imagination throughout his life, the significance of his Christian faith, and the ways that his fiction and nonfiction writings have influenced generations of people. The book begins with Lewis’s early childhood, and ends with his death. The pacing is surprisingly strong, as Leah Boden moves the reader through many decades of Lewis’s life and touches on a variety of different details. She glosses over or simplifies some more complex or troubling aspects of Lewis’s experiences, including his service in World War I, but the book is surprisingly thorough. It impressed me to see how many important facts Boden covered, and how many small but interesting details she found ways to include.
Some chapters cover a particular phase of Lewis’s life, and others are more topical, touching on multiple different things. The book sometimes leans towards telling rather than showing, but there is enough dramatization to make the book work, and to make it unique from a standard biography. However, the downside of this is that it is unclear which aspects of the story are based on Lewis’s autobiographical writings and personal letters, and which parts come from the author’s imagination. As a C. S. Lewis aficionado, I was able to identify many of the embellished elements, but the average reader will not have that ability. I would give this book a higher rating if there had been an author’s note to clearly differentiate between fact and fiction.
In addition to this, I thought that Boden’s portrayal of Lewis’s Christian conversion left much to be desired. She did not set up that part of the story well, since she never wrote much about Lewis’s prior atheism. She made a few passing comments about him feeling disconnected from his childhood faith, but she didn’t delve into his atheistic beliefs or his feelings about them, even when she was writing about related things in his life, like the nihilistic poetry he published after World War I. This makes aspects of the conversion narrative less clear, and Boden also left out some key details and embellished some things unnecessarily. I wish that she had set the stage better and followed Lewis’s autobiographical reflections on this more closely.
Chronicles of Wonder: The Story-Formed Life of C. S. Lewis is an engaging, well-researched story that highlights themes of faith, imagination, and creativity. The publisher recommends this book for children ages eight to twelve, but children younger than eight could listen to this as a read-aloud, and many families will enjoy this together. Although I wish that this book had clearly differentiated which parts were solely fact-based and which involved imaginative embellishments, this book is an engaging read that will appeal to the target audience.