The Magician's Book. By Laura Miller. Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp, $28.99, hardcover

There are regular people and there are Narniacs. A Narniac is someone who, as a child, badly wished to meet a faun walking through a snowy wood carrying an umbrella. Ideally, the faun would extend an invitation to visit its cozy cave for tea, boiled eggs, sardines on toast, and cake. Narniacs have read and loved C. S. Lewis’s 1950s series of children’s fantasy novels, the Chronicles of Narnia. Regular people haven’t read them—or have and subsequently decided they wished neither to meet a faun nor to eat sardines with one.

Salon.com cofounder Laura Miller is a Narniac. In The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, Miller, who was hooked on the Chronicles at age seven, recalls “countless, intoxicated readings” of the thrilling exploits of children from our world dropping into Lewis’s parallel one. Yet she isn’t always, as Aslan the lion would say, “a friend of Narnia”.

In Part 1, “Songs of Innocence”, Miller muses charmingly about child readers “aching” to commune with animals and read about adventures that happen only when parents aren’t around. She cheers the pipe-smoking Oxford don’s astuteness in giving his young characters opportunities to be taken seriously, his choice of girl protagonist Lucy Pevensie, and more.

“Trouble in Paradise” is less fun. At 13, Miller discovered that her beloved Chronicles were stuffed with Christian symbolism—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, was essentially The Passion of the Christ with talking animals. “I’d been fooled,” she concluded. Miller also smacks down the Christian apologist for Narnia’s swarthy, garlicky, cruel Calormenes; its seductive “dominatrix” witches; and Lucy’s “frivolous”, hence doomed sister Susan.

“Songs of Experience” rings sweeter. The author tramps Lewis’s Irish and English haunts, telling titillating tales of his friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien.

Miller’s deep affection for the Narnia she longed to visit as a child ultimately trumps her dressing-down of its fascinating creator, his sneaky Christian agenda, and that unignorable racist stereotyping. Friends of Narnia may side with compatriots interviewed here, such as Jonathan Franzen, whose kid self found those religious metaphors “cool”, and Neil Gamain, for whom Narnia was “an infinite number of stories waiting to happen”. But this reader best likes the bookish child Miller once was, dreaming of Lucy and the mermaid shepherdess in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.