The World Between the Rain

As part of the blog tour for this brilliant book, the author Susan Cahill, has written several guest blogs. In today’s blog, she shares some of her favourite stories featuring magical portals. How many have you read?

My review will follow in another post!

My favourite books with magical portals

As you might be able to tell from the title, The World Between the Rain is a portal fantasy, a book in which the characters in our world find a doorway to another world. These were (and are) my favourite kinds of books and I’ve spent a lot of time searching for possible magical doorways. 

My favourite books with magical portals, and some of the main inspirations for The World Between the Rain are as follows:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Whatever you think about the Christian overtones or C.S Lewis’s cruel treatment of Susan in The Last Battle (which I took personally), the dim and dusty wardrobe that leads into the bright white magic of Narnia is one of the most perfect portals. A wardrobe is both an everyday item– C.S. Lewis just describes it as ‘a big wardrobe; the sort that has a looking-glass in the door’ – and special – who knows what a wardrobe contains. Most people have wardrobes in their houses, but most do not contain a magical world full of powdery snow, peril, and possibilities. But it doesn’t hurt to keep searching and hoping that the next wardrobe you find will be the one that leads you into Narnia. I also loved the painting that was a portal in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the pools of water in the Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. C.S. Lewis knew what he was doing when it came to portals.

His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman

I first read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy when I was nineteen, the year I was studying for my Masters. I even wrote my Masters’ thesis on them, so obsessed was I with the idea of multiple parallel worlds and a knife that could cut doorways in the air. It’s such a brilliant image, a glimpse of another world just hanging in the air. 

The Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones is an absolute master at fantasy and magic that is somehow both intensely supernatural and profoundly matter-of-fact. I still remember taking Charmed Life off the shelves of Clonakilty library (my home town) and reading the opening lines: ‘Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolyn. She was a witch.’ I was sold immediately. This series of books also has the concept of parallel worlds, worlds that come about at moments of history when there are multiple potential outcomes. These different outcomes spilt off into different worlds, and of course, there are worlds where magic is not only possible, but real.

The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea

Myself and the brilliant children’s writer Sinéad O’Hart co-host a podcast about children’s books called Storyshaped (find it wherever you listen to your podcasts). We interview other children’s writers about the stories that shaped them and we also do deep dives into the books that shaped us the most. Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds of the Morrigan is a keystone book for both of us and we have an entire episode dedicated to it (we also have one on Charmed Life). What I loved most about this book were the blurry lines between our world and the world of Irish myth and folklore that the children, Pidge and Bridget, travel through. But there is also a portal moment when the two children ride a donkey called Serena through a mystical mist. Serena can detect the path using her long soft ears ass dowsing rods. Pure genius.

Other honourable mentions of portal fantasies or who explore the idea of other worlds include Sinéad O’Hart’s parallel universes in A Star-Spun Web, Louie Stowell’s Otherland, Efua Traoré’s Children of the Quicksands, A.F. Harrold’s The Worlds We Leave Behind and Liz Hyder’s The Twelve.