Review: Should have been better
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 14, 2013
The premise is good, not original by any means, but one of those tried-and-true "what if" starting points that always hook time-travel readers like me. What if a modern commuter aircraft hit an anomaly during a big storm and was tossed back to the Jurassic period? Regular work-a-day people and their flight crew vs. T. Rex and a gang of hungry raptors. Hard to go wrong with that set up, right? Well, maybe, unless the author decides to reveal each plot point in ways that suck all the terror and drama right out of each subsequent scene. In his efforts to cut back and forth from the modern day dinosaur dig/air crash investigation to the back-in-time survival struggles of the hapless passengers of flight 993, Mr. Ellington keeps giving every dramatic moment away before he shows it. The result is that what should be highly charged moments of terror and shock become just the real-life working out of what the reader has already learned will happen. Not the way to tell a story.The other nagging element about the book is the apparent shortage of serious research. For me, part of the enjoyment in stories like this is to be allowed inside new, complex worlds such as air travel, archaeological digs, air crash investigations, local and national security, not to mention the NSA. While all of these arenas have critical bearings on "Jurassic Flight," and the plot actually turns on a number of them, it seems only the most rudimentary efforts were made to understand and reveal the realistic workings of these organizations. The result is a novel that languishes in unreality. This is unfortunate because the more authenticity you can bring to your characters and the real-life organizations they represent, the longer you can suspend the inherent disbelief in the story situation. The devil is in the details and it was frustrating to see so many opportunities missed or fumbled in the book.I thought the twist at the end of the story was a welcome relief, but still, if you were paying attention throughout the novel, you realized there was little reason to motivate the modern day characters to make such a sudden, emotional, race-against-time to a far away airport. I know the author had a good reason but the characters did not. However, if the proper detail work had been done throughout the book in archaeology, and metallurgy, and air travel databases, and fossil forensics, and crash investigations, and discussions of time travel paradoxes, etc. everything could have been set up and motivated. As it is, since little was adequately prepared during the story, little worked at the end.