Dinosaur Cove

Because, dinosaurs.

The Snarf is back! These days I’m forgiving myself pretty readily for missing individual weeks but trying not to miss two in a row. Besides, the internet was missing a review of this random series about running around with dinosaurs.

Time for …

The Series: Dinosaur Cove
The Author: Rex Stone
The Illustrator: Mike Spoor
Length/Picture Density: 60-70 pages, lots of pictures

I put Dinosaur Cove in a large bucket along with Dragon Masters, Kingdom of Wrenly, and other series that have little nutritional value but are immensely entertaining for kids — at least kids who are into dinosaurs in this case.

The premise is barely a premise. Two boys meet on a beachy, rocky coastline, immediately become best friends, and then maybe one hour later discover they can travel back to dinosaur times by walking across some dino footprints they found in a cave.

There is no attempt to explain what’s going on there, no involvement of parents other than some quick hellos at the beginning and ends of books, and no real consequences for anything that happens in the story — everything resets once they travel back to their own times.

There is also very little character development and, from what I’ve read, no female presence in the books. Granted, the only humans who are in the story between the second and second-to-last chapters are the two boys, but the whole thing feels like a boy’s fantasy. The other recurring character we see the most of is a little dinosaur who acts almost exactly like a dog, including wagging its tail when it gets excited. Because lizards definitely do that.

In every book they narrowly escape death, but it never feels like that, because the vibe is always more “crazy adventure” than “mortal terror.” Which is fair enough — they probably wouldn’t keep returning to the dinosaur cave if there was any sense of how terrifying their adventures would actually be.

All that said, I don’t actually mind these books. They’re basically harmless and Leo loves them. Like the Dragon Masters series, I figure he might be reading them on his own at some point, and we’ll be looking for highly digestible, entertaining reads.

Also, I made it sound like the author puts little effort into these, and they are pretty formulaic, but they do reflect some level of dinosaur research (tail wagging aside) and there’s a map on the front and back that show the area they are in and the route they took, and it’s fun to recreate the story by looking at where they went.

And if you find them grating, they take 30 minutes or less to read … if you’re doing the reading.