Awesome / The Magician's Nephew

• Digory, having fallen for Schmuck Bait earlier in the book with disastrous consequences, holds fast to his promise to fetch Forbidden Fruit for Aslan without stealing any for himself — even when Jadis suggests that it could save his ill mother's life.
  • Special mention of Digory calling Jadis out on her temptations, including him passing on her promise of immortality because he doesn't want to be around when all his friends and family are dead. He then explodes on her when he breaks out of her last promise of using the apple to heal his mother, remarking that he knows Jadis well enough to know that she doesn't care about others, and she's faking things.
  • Further, Polly is watching the whole time. She could've made her presence known, but she didn't. Because it's not her mother who needs that apple.
• Jadis beating people off of her with the arm of the lamppost.
  • Jadis loose in London is basically one afternoon-long CMOA. It's the biggest compensation for any preachiness in C.S. Lewis's books that he had a sense of humor about this kind of thing. For instance, the Running Gag about how this is the best day the housemaid has had in recent memory. And of course, the One-Scene Wonder that is Aunt Letty: "Aunt Letty was a very tough old lady; aunts often were in those days."
    Jadis: [speaking magical words... that don't work]
    Letty: Drunk! I thought as much.
  • It is suggested that even without her magic, Jadis is so beautiful and terrifying and powerful that she really could have taken over England if given the chance.
• Aslan singing the world into existence. The described Scenery Porn of that entire sequence deserves to be shown on the big screen.
• King Frank. He's a London cab driver that steps up and becomes the first King of Narnia, just because he is willing to protect the Talking Animals.
  • And his wife, Helen (Nellie), who gets dragged into Narnia in the middle of laundry day and is like, "Hmm? What? Queen? Okay."
• The final reveal that Digory will grow up to be the Professor, and made the wardrobe from the first book from a tree brought back from Narnia.
• Although it is bone-chilling, the revelation of how and why Charn and every other living thing in that world was laid waste is indeed awesome.
• After Uncle Andrew all but flat-out states that he's using a potentially dangerous situation Polly's in (which he put her into) to make Digory do what he wants, Digory says he wishes he were the same height as Uncle Andrew, so he could punch the man in the face.
  • Preceded by Digory's mental Shut Up, Hannibal! reaction to Uncle Andrew's Above Good and Evil speech:
    "All it means," he said to himself, "is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants."
• And then Digory delivers an epic Kirk Summation to Uncle Andrew which is enough to actually scare the shit out of him:
  "I didn’t believe in Magic till today. I see now it’s real. Well if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right.”
  • Uncle Andrew tries to brush it off, but he's still very shaken up.
• After the escape from Charn, Jadis is brought to the Wood Between the Worlds, and she becomes deathly ill, begging the children not to leave her there. Polly throws Jadis's words back into her face.

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