The Deadlands: Hunted

It's hard out there for an artsy oryctodromeus

Oh hey, I’m back. We read a dinosaur book. It was good. Here’s my review of the dinosaur book.

The Series: The Deadlands
The Author: Skye Melki-Wegner
Length/Picture Density: 300 pages/no pictures!

Most of my reviews here have been about chapter books, which is kind of a funny name, because most books have chapters. This book also has chapters, but it is not a “chapter book” it is a “middle grade” book, which are written for the next age group up from chapter books. I’m not as familiar with the genre, but I believe it includes the Hunger Games and the Percy Jackson books and probably the Harry Potter books as well.

From my not-fully-informed view, middle-grade books tend to be intense. Wrenching emotions, struggles to survive, good characters forced to suffer horrible ordeals to make it through the incredibly challenging situations they’ve ended up in just because they made the difficult choice to do the right thing.

All of these are constants in Hunted, the first in a trilogy. The second comes out at the beginning of October, which must be the time to drop your new book because the sixth Dory Fantasmagory and third Wild Robot also come out around then.

It does seem like there comes a time when kids are ready for these bigger stories with significantly more strife for their main characters, and it’s a little much at first, but it does open up more opportunities for skillful storytelling, and Hunted delivers on that.

The story focuses on Eleri, a young oryctodromeus (a relatively small, herbivorous dino) who is born into times of war but has no interest in fighting. He wants to be a storyteller. His brother, Agostron, is an intense army bro who is disgusted by Eleri’s weak-hearted ways.

The war is between herbivore coalitions over territory, and it is made possible by mutations and some light magical elements that occurred after “the falling star” crashed into the Earth and killed most of the dinosaurs. Those mutations gave dinosaurs the capacity to plan, organize, form hierarchies, form coalitions, and go to war.

The story manages to weave in a few supernatural elements that don’t distract from or take over the story, namely the existence of starflecks, which can be spent to give a dinosaur a burst of energy, and are also used as currency.

Early on, Eleri is exiled from his tribe and is forced to live out in the Deadlands, an area where little herbivores aren’t expected to last long: the water and plant life is scarce and predators roam around looking for strays. Over time he meets other dinosaurs, all of whom have very different personalities from him and each other, but who mostly avoid full stereotyping.

There is a lot going on in this story, but the biggest arc might be Eleri’s evolving relationship with Tortha, a warlike triceratops who initially, like Eleri’s brother, sees Eleri as despicably useless. Over time they come to understand and respect each other in a way that I found well earned and very satisfying. Tortha’s aggression is a lot to handle at first, but other characters smooth out the reading experience as they appear.

In case you somehow hadn’t grasped this, there is a lot of dinosaur carnage. The book mostly eschews gory descriptions, but there is a war and there are carnivore attacks. There is also a fair amount of discussion of death. Eleri never met his mom because a pterosaur got her before he was born, and he spends some time thinking about a few dinosaurs that he indirectly kills in self defense. It all fits within the story well enough, but it’s just stuff to be aware of, depending on the sensitivity of your reader.

There is a significant death that we hear about but don’t actually see (so this character could turn out to be alive in a future book, Gandalf-style, which seems very possible), and a close call with another. Middle grade books are way more willing to kill good guys than chapter books, which can make me anxious, but this one, like many others, make it seem like a devastating death could happen without actually going there.

Hunted is well written and very well told. The drama seems to unfold naturally and the plot devices don’t feel heavy handed. If you’re up for an intense dino wartime exile story, this is a pretty good one.