Assigning (and thus, of course, reading myself) C.S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew must have put C.S. Lewis on my brain because I started my summer reading with an array of Lewis’s work all of which I can heartily recommend for many middle school students. One of the wonderful things about C.S. Lewis is that exploring his works means exploring multiple genres.
I began with Lewis’s classic The Screwtape Letters, which purports to document the correspondence between a senior devil and his protégé/nephew Wormwood. Screwtape gives his nephew advice about how to steal the soul of a particular English young man living during World War II’s bombing of London. Mature readers interested in the nature of good and evil or those interested in reading the classics should consider this book.
If you are a fan of mythology, as Lewis was, you might enjoy Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces. First, read a traditional version of the Psyche and Eros story, which you can easily find on the Internet. You will find a story in which Psyche’s sister ruins Psyche’s relationship with her husband Eros, the god of love. Then, read Lewis’s version of the story told from the point of view of Psyche’s sister. It is a story of love, jealousy, and our struggle to understand fate. Till We Have Faces was written more for adults than children, but it could easily fit into an eighth grader’s summer reading.
Finally, for science fiction fans, Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy beginning with Out of the Silent Planet. In this story, the protagonist Ransom is a philology professor (just like Lewis’s close friend J.R.R. Tolkien) kidnapped from Earth and taken to Mars by a scientist who plans for him to be given to the natives as a sacrifice. Ransom’s adventures with the creatures of the planet make up the bulk of this novel. Again, the Space Trilogy was written more for adults but is easily within reach of middle school students who enjoy a challenge.
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