Savage Dinosaurs of South Dakota(American Chillers #34)
by Johnathan Rand
Publisher: AudioCraft Publishing
Release Date: 2012
ISBN: 9781893699595
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Genre: Children's Thriller; Chapter Book
Time to read: 3 hours
Source: Meijer
aStore Link (Real Book): Savage Dinosaurs of South Dakota
Summary
(from Back of Book)
Autumn McLachlan and her best friend, Brady Vanguard, love dinosaurs. They absolutely love them. They read dinosaurs books, watch dinosaur movies, and know a lot about these prehistoric creatures that existed millions of years ago.
When famed inventor Samuel Putnam announces that he's going to build a dinosaur park in Rapid City, South Dakota - complete with lifelike, mechanical dinosaurs - Autumn and Brady have good reason to be excited. It will be like traveling back in time, millions of years, to witness these incredible beasts that once ruled the earth. And because these dinosaurs aren't real, surely nothing could ever go wrong.
Could it?
At the grand opening, Autumn and Brady are going to discover just how dangerous Mr. Putnam's park can be ... and when things go haywire, can two ordinary kids survive the savage attacks of these mechanical mega-ton monsters?
My Reaction
We had a short vacation in Cincinnati earlier this year, and during our downtime at the hotel I visited a Meijer store, which I had never heard of until I saw it when we found our hotel. For those of you not in the know, it's sort of like a much less people-and-merchandise-cluttered Wal-Mart (with which I'm immensely familiar). I found a book to read to our son for bedtime and then stumbled across Savage Dinosaurs of South Dakota and its enticing dinosaur cover and had to buy it.
See, I've been a big fan of dinosaurs since I could first read Tyrannosaurs rex all by myself. I had a little book that I completely wore out carrying it around and learning to pronounce all the names before I could even really pronounce some relatives' names. Then came Jurassic Park when I was around age ten and my fascination with dinosaurs was at a peak.
The 10-year-old in me just had to have this book, so much so that I made sure to buy my wife a book as well so I wouldn't feel bad about getting my own. My inner child was also a huge fan of the Goosebumps series, and everything on this book cover figuratively screamed "a story influenced by the works R.L. Stine".
Savage Dinosaurs is #34 in Johnathan Rand's American Chillers series, each of which take place in a different US state with their own spooky or thrilling tales involving pre-teen protagonists. True to my first prediction of the cover, this story fell in the same storytelling style of the Goosebumps series.
I am rather of an ambivalent mind in my review of this book. From my adult perspective, this is not a well-written story. Everything is a bit predictable, redundant at times, and deus ex machina is in abundant supply. The main characters know very specific details about some of the dinosaurs that are in Putnam's Dinosaur Park that not only have I not heard of, but that are pretty rather recent discoveries. The author also used a lot of foreboding at the ends of chapters, all of which reiterated the following ending sentence of Chapter 7: "Neither one of us would forget that day ... but it would be for all the wrong reasons".
On the other hand, my nostalgic mind loved it. It followed a formula I was very familiar with and joined my two childhood loves of dinosaurs and Goosebumps in a fun and exciting way. Plus, there were some cliffhangers that did have me catching my breath and reaching to turn the page quickly. Furthermore, unlike the Goosebumps series, the cliffhangers actually led into something; the chapter-endings in Stine's books almost always turned out to be something mundane and not adding at all to the story.
I enjoyed the book and definitely want to read more in the series. It was nice to just plough through a book (which was easy in this case since it was written for middle schoolers) and get a complete story. My rating of 3-1/2 stars is mostly from my adult POV review, but it would get 4-1/2 probably from 10-year-old me.
Ultimately, though, this is a series I would have gobbled up in junior high, and I think it would be a great introduction to a reluctant reader.
Reading Challenges: 2015 Authors A to Z Reading Challenge
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