DINOSAURS: EXPLORING PREHISTORIC LIFE AND GEOLOGICAL TIME — Review

Thought for the Day:

“Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.”
~ Salvador Dalí ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Do you ever feel like some of your scenes are just flat? HERE is a great post by Lisa Hall-Wilson that will help you bring those dead scenes back to life.

I don’t do writing exercises nearly as often as I should, but when I ran across the post HERE by Natalie Hart on Writer Unboxed, I thought this is something I need to take time to do.

HERE is a great Narrative Nugget from Janice Hardy that will help you look at your writing with a reader’s eye.

It has been kind of a strange week. I’ve been healing up pretty well from my fall, but my biggest problem is that there is still swelling around my eyes and the top of my nose. That means my glasses don’t sit on my face properly, and I get really tired trying to read anything, either on the computer or in books. It is taking me a lot longer to do anything reading-related than it should. Ugh! Not fun. But it is getting better every day.

I had a landmark birthday last week, and my family really made it a special day for me. My daughter Maggie flew in from New York, and my other daughter, Sara, and her family cooked up a fabulous dinner. Have I mentioned my grandson Gehrig is a chef-in-training? He’s very good. And my granddaughter Gracie is a baker, and an extraordinary one at that. So the great dinner was topped off with homemade cheesecake with homemade chocolate sauce and caramel sauce. It couldn’t have been nicer. Getting older has its perks.

I know that I am fully in touch with my inner child. Whenever I see a book about dinosaurs, I simply can’t resist. When I saw DINOSAURS: EXPLORING PREHISTORIC LIFE AND GEOLOGICAL TIME by Rachel Ignotofsky on the review list for the Los Angeles Book Review, I knew it was something I’d like. And I have a real soft spot for middle-grade picture books, so it was a win-win for me. Here is the review I wrote for LABR.

The title of Dinosaurs is a bit misleading, only because this book covers so much more than dinosaurs and the era in which they lived. After a quick introduction, readers will find a timeline that shows how recent, in the larger scheme of things, is the age of dinosaurs, and how many other important eras there are. There are sections on plate tectonics, understanding fossils, reading rocks, mass extinction events (there were many), and understanding evolution. These lead into sections on the many eons, eras, and periods in the history of the planet. Each section is chock full of information written in accessible, conversational prose that does not shy away from using scientific language. The writer, Rachel Ignotofsky, respects the middle-grade readers who will pick this book up and expects them to do what they need to do to read it. Every page is filled with wonderful illustrations, also by Ignotofsky, that support the vast amount of information being communicated. The illustrations are not terribly realistic but still convey a good deal of information. Young readers are infinitely curious, and they will lose themselves in this wonderful compendium of historical and scientific information. This is the perfect book for young science and history lovers.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.