Controls

dylan's blog

Animated sprite for reading category
reading

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH DAMSELS AND DINOSAURS (A BOOK I READ TWICE, ON PURPOSE, LIKE A FUNCTIONING ADULT)

June 28, 2026

A magpie in tiny half-moon reading glasses sitting at a courtroom witness stand labeled “MAGPIE BOOK CLUB — PICK #1 ON TRIAL,” holding up a copy of “Damsels and Dinosaurs” by Wren Jones with one wing while the other wing wipes away a single tear; in the defendant’s chair sits a small cravat-wearing dinosaur looking entirely too pleased with itself; the prosecution table is staffed by a pompous Regency gentleman in a powdered wig clutching a soggy “I WILL SAVE EVERYONE” banner that is visibly failing him; the evidence board behind them reads “EXHIBIT A: TOO COMPETENT HEROINE” and “EXHIBIT B: BROTHER WITH NO INNER LIFE” and, scrawled underneath in magpie-feather ink, “VERDICT: read it twice anyway, your honor”; a jury box full of confused bees; golden afternoon light through tall windows; a honey jar leaking sadly onto the floor

The review was supposed to go up on the 26th. It is the 28th. I would like to formally blame my ADHD, the World Cup, Pride, and the fact that I read the entire book again instead of writing about it — which, honestly, tells you most of what you need to know before I’ve said a single critical word.

But I have critical words. So let’s do the bit where it sounds like I hated Damsels and Dinosaurs, and then I pull the rug out at the end, because that is genuinely how reading this book felt.

The case for the prosecution

Poppy Fletcher is too good at things. Our heroine gets shipped off to her reclusive aunt’s tropical island to save the family’s collapsing honey business, and along the way she just… handles everything. Competent is great. Flawlessly competent is a vibe killer, because if the lead can’t fail, nothing she does has any weight. I kept waiting for the moment she’d be in over her head. It mostly didn’t come.

Seppie exists to be a brother. Seppie is Poppy’s betrothed and also the brother of Athena, Poppy’s grumpy ex — and that’s the whole character. He is a relationship coordinate. A man-shaped plot hinge. I’d have loved literally one scene where he wanted something for himself.

The ex-history is named but never opened. Poppy and Athena have a past, and the book tells you that, repeatedly, without ever letting you sit in it. The romance is genuinely lovely on the page — but it reads like two people falling in love for the first time, not two people reckoning with the wreckage of an old one. The history was a fact, not a wound. I wanted the wound.

But enough about that — YOU ARE HERE FOR THE DINOSAURS

And reader, the dinosaurs deliver. They are on the island. They come in every size, like a tasting menu of prehistoric danger. Tragically, nobody gets eaten (a personal disappointment I will carry to my grave), but they DO get deployed to scare the absolute daylights out of a contingent of bad guys, which scratches a related itch.

My favorite moment in the entire book: a pompous old white man shows up, radiating the energy of someone who has never been told “no,” fully convinced he is about to Save The Day — and then he just… doesn’t. Fails completely. Saves nothing. The book lets him flop in real time. I cackled. Flipping the Regency hero-rescues-everyone script and handing the competence to the women while the entitled gentleman face-plants is exactly the trick this whole genre-mashup is built to pull.

So here’s the rug-pull

Reading all that back, it sounds like I’m tearing this book apart. I am not. I read it twice. On purpose. For fun.

Because the premise is solid gold — a sapphic regency romance with dinosaurs and a failing honey business is a sentence that should be tattooed somewhere — and Wren Jones flips the dusty Regency tropes on their ear with queerness and a complete refusal to take the genre’s self-importance seriously. If you like Regency and you’re happy to wave your hands at some cheerful sci-fi nonsense to get dinosaurs onto a 19th-century island (I am extremely happy to do this), you will have a good time. I had a good time. Twice.

4 out of 5 magpie feathers. 🪶🪶🪶🪶

That’s a wrap on Pick #1. Thank you to everyone who read along, lurked along, or simply nodded supportively at the concept of a book club run by a bookstore that doesn’t exist yet.

Next month: Book Two

We’re doing a hard tonal 180. After an island full of dinosaurs scaring the cravats off villains, July’s pick is A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers — the cozy-SF benchmark, the book people hand you when you say “I want something that will lower my blood pressure.” A tea monk wanders off looking for a purpose, a robot wanders out of the wilderness looking for the answer to “what do humans need?”, and the two of them have the gentlest, most quietly devastating conversations about meaning you’ll read all year. Zero dinosaurs. Roughly the same number of feelings.

Where to get it:

Kickoff post goes up Wednesday, July 1. Go grab a copy and meet me back here.

Extra credit

Here’s a thing I only realized while writing this: I launched a queer book club at the start of Pride month, during the World Cup (the real kind, with feet), I personally love both football and being queer — and I opened with a book that has zero football in it. There are SO many lesbian football books. I had one job.

So consider this the extra-credit assignment nobody asked for: I’ve been reading Hotshot by Clare Lydon, and it’s everything: older protagonists, a star player, a gloriously “normal” person to fall for her and vice versa, England, all of it. I’m only about halfway through and I already want to hand it to strangers.

4.5 out of 5 magpie feathers, so far. 🪶🪶🪶🪶✨

Stay curious, hoard shiny things, and never trust a man in a powdered wig who says he’s got it handled.