WE LOVE DINOSAURS

Is there a child out there who doesn’t love dinosaurs?

Very young readers will thrill to the sight of these smiling, roly-poly, brightly colored dinosaurs of various kinds, painted in watercolors to resemble reassuringly friendly, beloved toys. With no pretense at verisimilitude or much educational enlightenment, 15 different species are depicted and labeled on the front and back endpapers, giving tiny dino lovers a very rough idea of what the creatures shown in the book probably looked like (with artistic license for the colors), the art differentiating among them to show off scientifically known attributes such as relative sizes, crests, horns, spikes, and so on. Told in very simple, rollicking verse, the text encourages vocabulary enrichment and also lends itself to animated reading, abetted by the sometimes-capitalized extra-large display type that’s used for important adjectives, nouns, and verbs. However, an adult will have to help children with the definition of the word “extinct,” depicted on the final spread featuring Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops skeletons and a wide-eyed white child in shorts and black child in a dress.

Nothing terribly special, but an energetic acknowledgment of the passion most tykes feel about these long-gone prehistoric animals.