Dinosaur Trouble
Nosy, a newly hatched pterodactyl, emerges from his shell peppering his mother with questions. From her answers he quickly learns a number of big words about himself: nidifugous, pterodactyl, pulchritudinous, and nomenclature. And that’s just in the first four pages. His utter faith in his mother’s wisdom falters when he spies a young apatosaurus by the river, whom his mother dismisses as a second-class creature. (At the same time, the apatosaurus mother calls the pterodactyls much inferior to us.) Nosy seeks out the dino anyway, and the two eventually unite their families. Together they devise a plan to end the Tyrannosaurus rex’s reign of terror and have more success than anticipated. Much of the book’s humor relies on wordplay and the juxtaposition of the clever mothers next to their dim-witted husbands. Frequent black-and-white cartoon illustrations, both inset and full page, enliven the text and add a light comic tone. Complex vocabulary and sentence structure make this book a good fit for advanced young readers or as a read-aloud. Grades 2-4. --Suzanne Harold