Rating: WORTHY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was a highly amusing book aimed at middle-grade readers. It's also quite short. I can't speak for middle-graders, but it amused the heck out of me! It seemed a bit far-fetched at first, all the bad luck this young girl was having trying to find dinosaur bones in the USA. Her first set turned into a crumbled mess in storage. She found more at a different location, only to be held-up at gunpoint by masked bandits and the bones were taken, and so it went.
Despite the far-fetched nature of the tale, I was willing to let this slide because it was a children's book, but then this girl figures out her expedition is being sabotaged, which I thought was a pretty good twist. The story is amusing, and the girl is plucky and smart: just my kind of female main character. She's also very patient with her opportunistic and rather avaricious father. The book is educational. Periodically there's a section which talks about the bones she finds and what kind of dinosaur it was and so on, and so I really liked this. I mean, what's not to like, especially since it's very loosely based on a real female dino-hunter?
It seemed to me to be the perfect story for any middle-grader interested in dinosaurs or in science in general. I'd have liked it slightly better if the girl had shown that she knew that you don't just find random dino bones. You have to look in certain rock strata where the bones would have been fossilized, so that information would have been nice. The assumption here is that the fossil hunter who prepared her maps would have marked the right location to search, but a small clarification about rock strata would have been a nice addition. I liked that she consulted books, journals and maps to plan her forays. That was a good touch. Overall, I enjoyed this very much and I recommend it as a worthy read.
