Becoming Mrs. Lewis
The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis
by Patti Callahan (Author)
Lauren Woodward (Narrator)
Book Description
In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.
When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis – known as Jack – she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.
In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice – and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.
At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story – a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.
My Review
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 ½ (4½ smiles!)
And Audiobook Review
Let me begin with the caveat that I listened to this novel on audiobook—and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was made even more special because I attended the awards ceremony at which Ms. Callahan received the 2019 ECPA Novel of the Year for this utterly unique love story. Until that banquet, I hadn’t heard of Ms. Callahan or her book, but I’m grateful for the introduction to them both.
Of course, most people in the known world have heard of C.S. Lewis. I knew a little about his scholarly background. He was an atheist who came to Christ. A literary genius who wrote in so many genres it makes my head swim.
Friends Becoming More
But I had no inkling of the depths his heart could feel for Joy Davidman. Granted, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is fiction, but it’s fiction based on Ms. Callahan’s meticulous research and interviews about this touching and unparalleled love story. A relationship that was unconventional then and now—as were many things C.S. Lewis did and wrote.
If you’re looking for the typical boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married, and live HEA, this is NOT the book for you. It’s a complex web of emotions, bad decisions, good friends, redemption, forgiveness, and real life. And in the end, we see what true love really is—with all its beauty and muck, ecstasy and pain, eternal consequence and momentary effects. This story is as mundane as it is intense in its complexity, and it will change the way you see C.S. Lewis and all he wrote because you’ll see Joy Davidman between every line.
Why Not 5 Stars?
The reason I’ve given 4 ½ stars instead of 5 is a little bit of plot-sagging in the middle. Perhaps it was the narrator’s voice that lulled me, but overall I enjoyed her melancholy, scratchy tone. Her performance was beautifully done and drew me into a full spectrum of emotions from yearning to joy. Mid-story was simply a little too much of the same ol’ struggles; however, the bittersweet end made it all worthwhile.
(Becoming Mrs. Lewis is available everywhere books are sold.)
