The Boy Behind the Wardrobe: How C.S. Lewis Grew Up to Create Narnia – written by Suzanne Poulter Harris, illustrated by Mira Miroslavova
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2026
One way to enter the portal of a celebrated life is through childhood. Young readers are naturally receptive to learning about how and why an accomplished adults became an artist, author, or scientist. The Boy Behind the Wardrobe is another distinguished entry from Eerdmans’ series, Incredible Lives for Young Readers. C.S. Lewis, the creator of Narnia began life as Jack, a literary and artistic child of Belfast. How he turned his childhood inclinations into a worldwide literary success is the subject of Suzanne Poulter Harris and Mira Miroslavova’s picture book.
There is a fine line between emphasizing the ordinary aspect of a future brilliant life, and reducing that brilliance to the ordinary. Harris and Miroslavova do not leave the impression that any child reading mythology or drawing pictures can necessarily achieve greatness in public life. They do make the connection between a fertile imagination and the production of art. The shipyards of Belfast were part of his background, but so was the relative privilege that sent him and his brother, Warnie, off to boarding school. That privilege proved to be a two-edged sword, when the school proved to be a site of cruelty. Other schools followed, but Jack’s “best days were spent sick at home,” a consequence which was both sad and, ironically, fortunate for the sensitive boy.
Some ingredients of an author’s work are rooted in life, while others spring from a combination of his dreams and artistic influences. Jack’s initial creation was a different universe from the later Narnia. Animal-Land, and its development as Boxen, featured small animals fortified by bravery and armor. When he and his cousins visited their grandfather, they would listen to Jack narrate stories within the unlikely site of a large wardrobe. As the saying goes, the rest is history, but not before other events intersected to make tale telling inside a piece of furniture into a cohesive series of books.
On a visit to a sick neighbor, Jack encountered a book of Norse mythology. This became unforgettable, as did the lessons with a private tutor who introduced other branches of world literature. When his Oxford education was interrupted by service in the First World War, Lewis joined the generation of young men permanently marked by that searing experience. His friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, on his return to Oxford, added another influence to his complex creative process. Narnia cannot be reduced to the sum of these parts; they are all presented as pieces of a puzzle, to be assembled along with the more mysterious parts of literary production.
The same blending of “real” life and imagination that defines the text is expressed in Miroslavova’s illustrations. Lewis and Tolkien are seated across a table from one another, dressed in formal attire. Each author is shadowed by line drawings of hobbits, elves, and Aslan the lion, the light shade of the creatures emphasizing that they are still in formation. Later, brighter and more defined elements from Jack/Lewis’s past take shape as the characters who would define his fully developed universe of Narnia. Other pictures adhere more closely to the mundane, or dramatic, daily reality, of the writer’s environment, including a stormy view of Lewis’s country home, away from the ravages of World War II London.
The Christian theology that forms the core of Lewis’s work is not explored in The Boy Behind the Wardrobe. This has the, perhaps unintentional effect, of offering a more inclusive appeal to readers who will not all share Lewis’s religious beliefs. Whatever the reason behind this choice, adults sharing the book with children can discuss the multiple parts of Narnia, or any fictional universe, and how they reflect a dialogue among many different voices. After all, that is the central point of this inspiring picture book biography.