DINO BITES!

More of a snack than a full-course meal, this brief, briskly-paced adventure will nonetheless capture the attention of the very youngest dinosaur fans—and give the adults reading aloud a good giggle too.

Cartoon-style illustrations of three kinds of dinosaurs and a dragonflylike insect gallop, dart and swoop in a primitive portrait of a basic food chain that quickly pivots to become a prehistoric take on the old lady who swallowed a fly. A great, green T. Rex looks forward to gobbling a smaller, purple-plated dinosaur. Meanwhile the purple-plated dinosaur plans to snack on a little blue guy who’s busy chasing that big bug. Simple sentences and single-word captions propel the action through crunching and munching to the abrupt, explosive but ultimately happy ending (which will undoubtedly seem especially hilarious to preschoolers schooled in polite behavior). Broad humor may distract readers from the cleverness of the text, which features amusing internal rhymes and parallel sentences that punch up the joke. Variations in font mirror the differences between the characters, heavy black outlines make the creatures pop against brightly colored pages, and the simply drawn eyes and mouths are remarkably expressive.

This may be slight, but it’s also tasty fun that goes down easily and is sure to provoke demands for seconds (and thirds and…).