This was one of those books that I failed to read as a child but everyone else apparently did. So now I'm trying to catch up and it's fascinating to read the story about kids going into a fantasy world that defined so many of the books that the authors my age read and are responding to.
It's also good. It's good in the way that it responds to Narnia and good in the way that it thinks about story and fascinating to think about what's going to happen.
It's odd seeing how this book would have grabbed me if I'd read it 20 years ago and enjoying it now without being grabbed.
It reminds me, for perhaps obvious reasons, of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in how they are stories about coming into another world and discovering the seriousness of it. But it's also very different. I suppose that means I need to track down the rest of them now.