A most excellent adventure, with more (Hint: Can you say “Aaarrrgh!”?) to come.
A feckless pair of time-traveling T. Rexes make a stopover in ancient Egypt.
Between the burning-hot sands and the crocodile-infested river, it’s shaping up to be a bummer of an outing—until young Tut happens along and, mistaking one of the dinos for Sobek, god of the Nile, declares himself a fanboy. From then on it’s all parties and feasting aboard the royal yacht, with tours of landmarks ranging from the Library of Alexandria (“And this is where I check out all your comic books”) to the Sphinx (“a practical joke that got out of hand”). This goes on until, that is, the extraterrestrials who “come down every couple of weeks to work on that triangle project” catch sight of the opportunistic visitors and dash the divinity bit with some Cretaceous Era selfies. Uh oh, time to jump back into the time machine for a quick, random getaway. Next stop (as the final scene suggests) is definitely not Kansas. Chapman floats blocky figures of the voracious visitors, their diversely brown human hosts, and hairless blue ETs clad in uniforms strongly reminiscent of Star Trek’s against very simple, often monochromatic backgrounds, leaving plenty of space for gags and banter. He also slips in an easter egg, having the real Sobek and archenemy Drought duke it out in a minicomic printed inside the dust jacket.
A most excellent adventure, with more (Hint: Can you say “Aaarrrgh!”?) to come. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6155-6
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Sturdy split pages allow readers to create their own inventive combinations from among a handful of prehistoric critters. Hard on the heels of Flip-O-Saurus (2010) drops this companion gallery, printed on durable boards and offering opportunities to mix and match body thirds of eight prehistoric mammals, plus a fish and a bird, to create such portmanteau creatures as a “Gas-Lo-Therium,” or a “Mega-Tor-Don.” The “Mam-Nyc-Nia” places the head of a mammoth next to the wings and torso of an Icaronycteris (prehistoric bat) and the hind legs of a Macrauchenia (a llamalike creature with a short trunk), to amusing effect. Drehsen adds first-person captions on the versos, which will also mix and match to produce chuckles: “Do you like my nose? It’s actually a short trunk…” “I may remind you of an ostrich, because my wings aren’t built for flying…” “My tail looks like a dolphin’s.” With but ten layers to flip, young paleontologists will run through most of the permutations in just a few minutes, but Ball’s precisely detailed ink-and-watercolor portraits of each animal formally posed against plain cream colored backdrops may provide a slightly more enduring draw. A silhouette key on the front pastedown includes a pronunciation guide and indicates scale. Overall, a pleasing complement to more substantive treatments. (Novelty nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7892-1099-9
Page Count: 22
Publisher: Abbeville Kids
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
Eye candy and intellectual nourishment alike for newly independent readers.
A classic informational early reader gets a substantial, long-overdue update.
Kirkus criticized the 1985 edition for conveying outdated and misleading information—chivalrously leaving the stodgy colored-pencil illustrations unmentioned. All of that has been addressed here. Revised by the late Milton’s brother Kent, the text highlights or at least names over a dozen dinos, from the diminutive Citipati to the humongous Argentinosaurus, “as big as a house, longer than three buses, and as heavy as thirteen elephants!” Prehistoric contemporaries that were not dinosaurs also get nods, as do modern paleontology, the great extinction and the continued survival of birds: “So the dinosaur days go on.” Tempesta’s cover painting of a brightly patterned Triceratops being attacked by a T. Rex with a feathery spinal fringe opens a suite of equally dramatic group and single portraits. They feature mottled monsters viewed from low angles to accentuate their massiveness and reflect current thinking about feathers and coloration.
Eye candy and intellectual nourishment alike for newly independent readers. (Informational early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-37923-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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