J/D Ficathon

The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis is the first in the Deptford Mice series, which is a set of children's books from the 1980s. I haven't read any kids' books for a while (though the Amulet comic series as a whole is one of my top reads of 2025 so far) so I was a bit apprehensive going in. The copy I have is a beautifully crisp edition, with gorgeous illustrations throughout, which was lovely - but the story took me by surprise in two ways. It follows a community of mice in London, who are drawn into the sewers by the threat posed by a mysterious dark god, worshipped by the evil rats. But, for the most part, we get a vast number of viewpoint characters, largely wandering about, getting lost and looking for each other - which isn't wildly interesting or exciting... It's also intermittently pretty dark and quite grim (I'm sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it as a child), with a lot of talk of mice getting peeled, and some quite horrific things actually happening to various characters along the way. Then, with only about 20 pages to go, there's suddenly a massively tense and action-packed climax with a battle in which a lot of the mouse characters acquit themselves extremely well and everything gets wrapped up in a surprisingly satisfying way. So, I'm glad I read through to the end, but it was a bit of a slog to get there.

PS Burn This Letter Please by Craig Olsen was a complete contrast, as it's a nonfiction book charting the history of a close-knit group of New York drag queens in the 1950s and 60s, based on a cache of letters discovered by the author in a friend's personal effects. I thought it was going to be mostly the letters, but there's actually a very strong narrative by the author that's part memoir, part biography, part history book, and that aspect interested me and engaged me much more than the actual correspondence. It's by turns heartwarming, interesting, surprising, tragic, horrifying, funny, desperately sad - and, overall, celebratory. I did feel the tone didn't always match the content, especially in the darker sections, and also in the fact that the drag queens' apparent rampant shoplifting was always portrayed as harmless fun and entertaining japery, despite them quite often ending up in prison over it... Still, I learned some interesting things and found the narrative overall to be affecting and well written (though it did have some technical issues with tense and typos, which were quite annoying).

Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya is a nonfiction book about trends in the portrayal of women in film, and how audiences have reacted to the less likeable ones over time.

It seemed like it might be right up my alley, since I often look at female representation in media, both in my book reviews and my media reviews podcast.

But...

The author herself says: "This book really shouldn't exist. Writing about unlikeability seems old-fashioned, superfluous or even dopey at this point."

Her point is that we, as a society, should probably have moved on from needing to discuss the marginalisation and/or double standards applied to the presentation of women in fiction - but it's disappointingly the case that it's still a thing. And I agree!

But, unfortunately, for me, the book didn't seem to have anything particularly new or interesting to say about the subject.

To be fair, the history section was quite good, particularly in discussing the dominance of women in the early years of Hollywood, and also the acknowledgement of issues of intersectionality for both queer women and women of colour in media.

But, at a micro level, I actually found it hard to follow and take in for some reason. And at a macro level, it didn't have enough to say to keep me engaged. Once it got to the main sections, detailing the different types of unlikeable female characters, it essentially just turned into a list of different roles in different films and that was about it.

I skipped around a bit to see if any of the sections were more interesting than the others - but eventually decided to DNF.

Cursed Cocktails by SL Rowland is basically Legends & Lattes but with alcohol instead of coffee.

An elven battle mage retires from military service and opens a bar. He makes both cocktails and friends - and that's about it.

Don't get me wrong - it was an enjoyable listen, with a very good narrator. I liked the characters, the found family vibes were strong, and it was all very sweet and lovely.

But it was a bit nothing-y overall. Legends & Lattes was a rare five-star read for me, and this didn't live up to that by any means. It somehow lacked the emotional depth, and there was so little threat that it all felt a bit pointless.

The romance was also disappointing - the pairing was obvious from the start and I was wholly on board, but it wasn't even a slow burn. There was absolutely nothing going on until 90% through, and even then it was barely there, which was a shame.

Also up until the 90% mark, the most dramatic thing that happened was that someone broke a glass and cut their hand. Then there was a brief bit of intense action, but it didn't last long and there wasn't ever any real sense of threat.

So yeah - a fun time but very, very slight.

My wonderful brother bought me Uprooted by Naomi Novik, especially to fulfil my Magical Readathon prompt for June, so I could keep to my planned TBR theme for June of reading all the books he's given me that I haven't read yet...

I tried so hard, I really did - but I just couldn't do it and I DNF'd it on pg 160...

The book is a loose Beauty and the Beast retelling, whereby a wizard called The Dragon takes a 17-year-old girl from a nearby village every ten years and keeps her in his tower to be his servant, then releases her with a ton of money and picks another one. The main plot, though, is to do with the evil force in the neighbouring forest trying to take over the human realm, and our plucky protagonist, Agnieszka, teaming up with the wizard to try and defeat it.

I will say, it wasn't all bad - far from it. I struggled a bit at the start, since there are several chapters of Agnieszka being abused and assaulted by more than one man, purely because The Dragon doesn't have the decency to speak to her as if she's a human being or explain anything to her in a sensible way. And I really wasn't keen at all on the way Agnieszka made excuses for this behaviour and diminished herself in the process.

It picked up quite a bit once the training montage properly got going (with a particularly wonderful extended nature metaphor about Agnieszka's experience of learning magic), and I loved Agnieszka taking matters into her own hands repeatedly to try and do what she thinks is right. I also loved her best friend, Kasia, and the development of the relationship between them.

But - as soon as the sexual tension was brought into things, it just made me really uncomfortable - because Agnieszka is 17 and The Dragon is over 100 years old... Problematic power dynamics, much? And also - ick. And then it got explicit (way more so than I was expecting) and I just had to put it down.

It turns out, I have read it before and finished it that time, though the romance aspect also really put me off - and I apparently wasn't convinced the story as a whole was worth pushing through. The main thrust of the storyline hadn't actually even started yet when I DNF'd it, and the summary on Wikipedia suggests an awful lot happened in the last two thirds. But I just wasn't invested in it enough to get past the ick, I'm afraid.