The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had to DNF this one. It’s boring, and the plot is trite, and the pacing is weird. I didn’t care about any of the characters, so after I stuck with it through 100 pages, I called it quits.

The writing is really condescending, and points out the obvious over and over. In the beginning, the setting is described as a society of mice who are afraid of the sewers below their community because the evil rats live in the sewers and they eat any poor mice who go wandering down there.
Then a mouse named Albert is lured into the sewers, and the author thinks they need to tell me and explain again and again that Albert is afraid. He’s afraid of the sewers because there are ravenous rats in the sewers. He’s afraid of the rats because the rats capture and eat mice. Albert is afraid.
OMG, don’t tell me 50 times that Albert is afraid. I can deduce that very well for myself!

That’s probably why I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, because I wasn’t allowed to just feel the emotions of the characters through the story; I was TOLD the character’s emotions, and that gets annoying really fast.

The pacing felt jarring and strange. One minute the characters are fleeing for their lives, and then we cut to a scene of a momma mouse with her little mouslings having cake a festival. The story didn’t flow very well from scene to scene.

I’ve heard this compared to Redwall. No, no, no! Redwall actually has good writing and interesting characters.

View all my reviews