The Dark Portal: Cover and Prologue

[copperfyre]

For my first review for this community, I decided to tackle a very different genre from kalinara who is so excellently perusing fantasy and science fiction, and went for that oddly big genre of Children’s Books About Anthropomorphic Animals, Often Rodents. Quite why this is such a popular genre I’m not sure (though I think it is a less popular genre today than it was, nobody seems to be writing the 2010s version of Redwall, though if anyone is, point me in their direction, I am interested to see where this genre is going) but I read a lot of it as a child.

And, to start off with, I am not in fact doing Brian Jacques’s Redwall, possibly the most famous example, but Robin Jarvis’s The Deptford Mice, a book series that I loved as a child, but also which profoundly terrified me to the point where I hid the books at the back of my bookshelf so that things couldn’t escape from them. (I don’t actually remember how old I was at the time, or to what extent I thought this was a possibility.) I like to think that adult me will be less terrified, but I am also interested to see how they hold up to a reread and, at that, an adult reread.

( Onwards, to rodent shenanigans! )