Deptford Mice and Drag Queens
Jun. 5th, 2025 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe 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).
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).
