Once a Castle (The Carrick Hall Novels, Book Two) by Sarah Arthur (2025)
Your fondness for C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia will likely determine how much you enjoy Once a Castle, the second installment in Sarah Arthur’s Carrick Hall series. In Arthur’s novels, a group of youths from our world stumble into the fantastical land of Ternival, where they must help the resident talking animals, dryads, and centaurs battle the machinations of an evil queen. Which, on paper, is a little on the nose. But that doesn’t make Once a Castle any less enjoyable. As with 2024’s Once a Queen, Arthur’s prose is light, fun, and eminently readable — I think I finished the book in a little over two days — and even quite beautiful and moving at times, be it the heroism of the centaur Starwise, the characters’ acts of grace and forgiveness, Arthur’s commentary on the nature of fairy tales, or even an apparent attempt to improve upon Lewis’ Calormenes. As with Once a Queen, Arthur crams an awful lot into Once a Castle and her attempts to weave the different plots and timelines together can feel a bit jumbled, which makes the ending feel just a bit too neat, tidy, and convenient. That said, I truly enjoyed my return trip to Ternival, and I’m looking forward to Arthur’s third Carrick Hall book, Once a Crown. (Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy.)
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