Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

I think of how the author must’ve found some of his fantasyland in this place, because I think I can see it too. I can almost imagine Mr. Tumnus ambling from behind a rock or the great Aslan setting his huge lion paws on the ground as it shakes with his majesty.

Maybe when we know we will lose someone, we love fiercer and wilder.

he knows the light in her eyes is her love for him. It makes him feel that no

matter what happens, he will be okay, and so will she.

Only the bravest of the brave could keep them from conquering.

together they imagined what knights and kings battled, what princesses needed saving, and what quests lay ahead for the royal kingdom of this castle.

“God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want,” she told her sons. “There are things we can’t know about His great plan.”

“With stories, I can see with other eyes, imagine with other imaginations, feel with other hearts, as well as with my own. Stories aren’t equations.”

“The fantastic and the imaginative aren’t escapism.”

“Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning.” “Yes,” Warnie says. “It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’”

George leaves the small room where he sits in a wardrobe and enters the kind of library he’s always wished for, full of books and woodsmoke and soft leather chairs. The whole library was overflowing with books. They rested on tables, shelves, the floor, and even a chair. Leather-bound and clothbound, old and new. In that library in Little Lea, nine-year-old Jack sat at a desk, one too large for such a young boy, and his head was bent over a huge and old atlas of the world. It was bound in soft cloth, and the edges were smooth from use. Jack was flipping the pages and smiling as if painted sea and earth rose from the book itself.

But I think what I was trying to say is that when my fictional characters show up, or the ones you’re reading about in that book, they have a place they’re going. A journey. A math problem does too. I’ve seen Father spend years on one equation until it shows him the way it is meant to go. That’s what a story does with me. I’m not trying to convince you, Megs with the flashing blue eyes, that my work is more important than yours, but maybe it’s just as important.”

“Every life should be guided and enriched by one book or another, don’t you agree? Certainly, every formative moment in my life has been enriched or informed by a book. You must be very careful about what you choose to read—unless you want to

stay stuck in your opinions and hard-boiled thoughts, you must be very careful.”

“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”

“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”

Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.

The brave boy’s story was short but full of just as much courage as any knight in shining armor fighting a dragon, just as full of bravery as any explorer journeying to the ends of the world to save a maiden, just as adventurous as any odyssey to the center of the earth. The young boy understood now, after all the tales and adventures, after all the drawings and stories, and he told the grown-ups, who aren’t as smart as children, “There is a light, a bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.” Then his bedroom filled with the feeling of snow and light and warmth and darkness and joy and grief—everything of the broken and whole world, incongruent and holy, overflowing with mystery. This feeling in his room was far better than the stories he loved, and yet the same. The hints had always been right in front of his eyes and inside his heart. The stories that thrilled him were echoes of the world that waited for him. And he heard, as loud as a new world thundering out of the cosmos, the mighty roar of a lion.

In Once Upon a Wardrobe, Patti smashes through the steep waves and torrents of life in ways that will leave us all astonished, searching and looking hard ahead. This is not merely a book worth reading, it is a book that will drive us through the difficulties of love and of sorrow, to struggle, gasping onward and upward, our emotions surging with us until we are brought, once again, to love.

“Sometimes fairy stories may say best what needs to be said.”