BY G. CONNOR SALTER
Giant by Judith McQuoid. Little Island Books, March 14, 2025. Paperback, 180 pages.
East Belfast boy Davey is not sure what to expect when his mother gets a job cleaning the Lewis home and has him come along to help. He certainly did not expect to make a friend. Clive Staples Lewis—Jack, as he insists on being called—is more imaginative than any boy Davey has met before. Jack likes drawing, talking about the fantasy world he invented with his brother Warnie called Boxen, and hearing the Irish fairy stories Davey learned from his mother. Davey enjoys the books that Jack loans him, and the excitement Jack shows when Davey draws pictures. Davey’s mother is less sure that Jack is a good influence. He gives Davey ideas about a life that their family cannot have.
The boys’ friendship encounters another obstacle when Jack’s mother dies and Jack’s father sends him to a boarding school in England. Davey worries that he’ll never see his friend again. He also wonders what a working-class boy like him, whose parents need him to work at the shipyard to make up for his father losing his job pushing a bread cart, will do with a passion for fairy tales and drawing animals. Will the lessons he learned from Jack help him find another way to live?
Fiction about C.S. Lewis and his associates in the Inklings often aim for a fantastic tone that emulates their mythopoeic fiction. Whether it’s stories set in the real world featuring supernatural relics (Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel by David C. Downing) or fantasy adventures featuring high-sea adventure (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica by ), readers can usually see how these novels clearly emulate one or more of the Inklings’ novels. Done well, they become interesting commentaries or homages on the Inklings. Done poorly, they become dull Inklings fanfiction.
McQuoid opts for a subtler approach. She offers plenty of references to the Inklings that fans will notice. It’s no accident that when Davey visits a bookshop with Jack, he finds a fairytale collection by a Scottish writer named George MacDonald. Nor is it a surprise that one of the boys notices a lion-shaped door knocker while exploring a house. But none of these references become obnoxiously obvious. McQuoid trusts her readers to know Lewis’s life well enough that she can subtly reference his life while telling a story centered in turn-of-the-century Belfast. This is a novel about C.S. Lewis, but one that prefers to give a well-developed sense of his childhood home rather than fill the narrative with Easter eggs about his future life. The result is something much more than a book about C.S. Lewis: a book that can stand on its own as a story about friendship, and then becomes richer once readers notice the references adding a new layer of meaning.
McQuoid’s subtle approach does mean that she needs to make her story compelling for readers who will miss the Inklings references at first. She must make her audience care about Davey and Jack even if they do not know who Jack Lewis will grow up to be. Fortunately, she rises to the challenge. Davey and Jack are compelling, believable characters. The Belfast community that Davey inhabits, with its harsh work conditions alongside people’s fierce refusal to despair, offers an entertaining backdrop to their adventures.
Since the story is so informed by the challenges of being working-class in turn-of-the-century Belfast, it is impressive how much McQuoid captures the social pressures Davey faces. There is a tendency to call this kind of story “Dickensian” since Charles Dickens defined our cultural image of the Victorian working class, but McQuoid manages to capture the things Dickens wrote about without using any of his images which have become clichés. The world that Davey inhabits feels real, therefore the concern his parents feel about making ends meet feels palpably real, and the shift that happens as Davey gains a new vision about how to live from his new friend feels all the more powerful.
A beautifully-written middle grade novel that makes well-trodden subjects in ways that make them enchanting again.
For an F&F interview with author Judith McQuoid, check out the following article:
Fellowship & Fairydust 