During a recent family trip to South Africa, there was one book from my holiday reading pile that I simply couldn’t put down. It had everything: suspense, mystery, humour, fantasy, plot twists, heroes, villains and, ultimately, a happy ending. It also contained talking animals, unicorns and fauns. Because this wasn’t the latest bestselling crime or psychological thriller – my usual genres of choice. It was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the children’s story by C.S. Lewis that I’d first read almost 40 years earlier.
Given that I have a nine-year-old son who adores books, you might imagine that my motivation for re-reading it was to do so aloud to him. Not so. At the time, the two of us were devouring the latest in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series together at bedtimes. But, at 49 years old, reading children’s books curled up on my own has become my guilty pleasure.
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